EMVC leads investment in commerce platform Niki to serve India's 500mm new internet users

Niki is turning India’s 500 million new Internet users into transacting consumers

India’s emerging B2C commerce platform for new Internet users, Niki has recorded unprecedented growth in the past year. It has fulfilled nearly 1 million transactions across Hindi, Bengali and Tamil with gross merchandise value (GMV) on track to hit an annualized run rate of $100mn by March’20 and several new languages launching soon. EMVC led the financing round which included existing investors Recruit Strategic Partners, Unilazer Ventures, SAP, and Sir Ratan Tata.

Niki is on a mission to turn India’s 500 million new Internet users into transacting consumers. Niki has built Internet commerce in the style that’s most natural to these users: A local agent, whereby a user can replicate talking to a neighborhood human agent in their own language to access hundreds of services with seamless fintech and conversational voice AI. Niki’s proprietary deep technology mirrors and enhances the offline experience leveraging machine learning and Natural Language Processing.

“Since realigning our focus to cater directly to language-first consumers, we have seen brand virality and 30% month on month growth. For 84% of our Hindi transactions, it’s the user’s 1st transaction online.” said Sachin Jaiswal, Niki CEO and co-founder.

Melissa Frakman, Founder and Managing Partner at EMVC, said, “Niki is changing the commerce landscape of India by unlocking a completely new user base for 1000s of service provider companies. The exceptional founding team has a uniquely personal understanding of its customers and has re-imagined a voice-first, trust-centered experience to solve for new internet users specific challenges and preferences. From a global perspective, Niki is paving a new path for solving e-commerce and fintech distribution for the world’s emerging internet economy.”

Jaiswal added: "We are on a mission to build the most trusted app to avail services online for new Internet users, and seize a $750 billion opportunity. We aim to grow this to $1 billion GMV by 2021”.