GlobalBees is a fast-growing company led by a small group of innovative industry leaders. The team works to build tomorrow’s brands and scales them with its innovation-led strategy and a consumer-first approach. It partners with entrepreneurs who set up an online business.
5000+ D2C companies can grow together to build products based on unique consumer insight. GlobalBees helps these businesses get recognition in India and outside the South Asian market.
The company offers a platform for businesses to grow, scale, and sell to marketplaces such as Amazon, Flipkart, and other channels.
About the founder and the company
GlobalBees was founded by Nitin Agarwal, the former President and Group Chief Investment Officer (CIO) of Edelweiss Financial Services and Supam Maheshwari, the e-commerce baby platform founder FirstCry with an initial investment of $75 million.
Company aims to acquire and partner with digitally native brands across categories such as beauty and personal care, home, kitchen, food and nutrition, and sports and lifestyle.
These brands need to have a revenue run rate between $1 million and $20 million, which, as per the company, prove to be the product-market fit.
With the past entrepreneurial stints and the experience in building one of the largest e-commerce platforms in India, the duo of Nitin and Supam is the perfect team to go after this idea.
Objective and growth drivers
The main objective is investing in and nurturing brands to provide joyful product experiences to the world.
The growth drivers of GlobalBees are based upon the 3 – I’s:
- Innovation – Consumers’ needs are progressively changing. GlobalBees works towards out-of-the-box ideas to fulfill the needs and extensively focuses on improving customer experience.
- Inspiration – people inspire GlobalBees. The brand always listens to consumers and grows with their aspirations. This helps it to create innovative products, even in challenging times.
- Impact – Products can affect the lives of consumers positively. GlobalBees works with entrepreneurs to benefit the customers as well as the society.
GlobalBees Business Model
GlobalBees, an investment platform modelled on Thrasio, acquires sellers on Amazon and provides them with the necessary resources to expand their brand.
It aims to acquire e-commerce retailers for branding, product development, and other activities like warehousing and logistics to grow them into bigger brands.
The company helps to grow the brands across various customer segments by evaluating the businesses and performing thorough research and analysis. After preparing the due diligence, the legal and finance team starts drafting the required paperwork.
Once the documents are signed, the fund and ownership are transferred accordingly.
GlobalBees Funding
Within three months, GlobalBees had managed to raise a record $150 million in a Series A financing round led by FirstCry, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and others.
Nine-year-old GlobalBees has now become India’s latest unicorn after raising $110 million in its Series B round.
In this round, Vikas Agnihotri of Softbank, Harsha Kumar of Lightspeed, Atul Gupta of Premji Invest, Sudhir Sethi of Chiratae Ventures, and Kshitij Sheth of Chrys Capital joined the board of GlobalBees.
The latest round values GlobalBees at $1.1 billion, making it the second-fastest Indian startup and 43rd in the world to enter the unicorn club.
Conclusion
It is too early to tell whether brand-of-brand companies will use their expertise and economies of scale to grow their portfolio brands. GlobalBees certainly seems to be challenging the conventional wisdom on how fast its startup has attained a valuation of $1 billion.
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