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India aims to become a $5 trillion economy by 2025, but this goal wouldn’t be attainable without the growth of digital commerce, which includes ecommerce, and newer offshoots like D2C commerce and social commerce. 

Amidst the dominance of Flipkart and Amazon, the D2C market in India exploded last year, with hundreds of new brands, products, and business models expanding the overall digital commerce pie. 

COVID-19 has given a push to online transactions and people are buying into newer categories. Hence, more experiments are likely, and India is projected to have over 3,000 D2C brands by 2025. Over 150 million people are said to be transacting on D2C platforms. 

Even though digital commerce currently accounts for only about 4 percent of India’s overall retail market, the future looks promising, with traditional players beginning to make inroads into the space. 

In 2020, Reliance launched its offline-to-online retail marketplace JioMart, while earlier this year, the Tata Group acquired online grocer BigBasket for $1.2 billion, further expanding the scope of digital commerce in the country.

The Interview

With increased digitisation due to COVID-19, going global has become slightly easier and cheaper. Vernacular.ai CEO Sourabh Gupta shares that demand for AI-enabled voice products is growing, and the sector is expected to be a $35-50 billion opportunity by 2025. He believes that the world is heading towards a voice-led future as a billion people move online.  

Editor’s Pick: 100x Entrepreneur

Arun Venkatachalam has always been interested in financial services. The angel investor has backed 25+ companies, including Posist, Zoomcar, ZestMoney, and AdPushup, among others, to date. In this podcast, he shares insights about early investments (Posist and Yourbus), and why he believes in investing deep into a particular sector once he’s taken a bet. Read more. 

Startup Spotlight

Samunnati solves the working capital needs of smallholder farmers, agri-SMEs

In India, smallholder farmers are not only under massive debts, but only 11 percent of them have access to organised lenders and farm loans. To solve this, veteran banker Anilkumar SG founded Samunnati, an agri-fintech startup that works towards improving market linkages, makes credit more accessible to farmers and agribusinesses, and helps agriculture become more efficient. Read more.

News & Updates

Before you go, stay inspired with… 

“Brands growing in D2C segments are focussed not only on innovative products and finding the right voice for their brand but also on customer experience and their feedback.”

— Vikas Garg, Co-founder, Shipway

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