Lightspeed Venture Partners also participated as a part of the round, along with Premji Invest, Chiratae Ventures and Softbank amongst others.

The Thrasio-style model, as popularly known, is when a company acquires fast-growing online brands to build an assortment of products while helping these brands scale and significantly grow their business through investment in technology, working capital and marketing efforts.

The model was popularised by US-based firm, Thrasio, founded in 2018, which has already raised $1.85 billion in equity and debt, till date.

Back in India, the model has caught the fancy of investors. Earlier in June, 10Club raised $40 million as a part of its seed round, led by Fireside Ventures, making it the highest seed-funded startup in India.

Founded by FirstCry founder, Supam Maheshwari and Nitin Agarwal, GlobalBees looks to partner with digitally native brands across categories like beauty, personal care, home, kitchen, food, nutrition, sports, lifestyle with a revenue rate of $1 million to $20 million.

Apart from making strategic investments, GlobalBees plans to further help these brands scale and diversify their digital footprint through direct-to-consumer channels. It also plans to provide support with product development, branding and other key activities such as warehousing and logistics.

“GlobalBees aims to unleash the power of product innovation by Indian entrepreneurs and strategically partner with them to help them realize the full potential of their brand and products. Apart from capital, GlobalBees brings in strategic capabilities across marketing and growth, technology, distribution, sourcing, product development and operations- all things essential to rapidly scale the brands in the digital space,” said Nitin Agarwal, co-founder and chief executive officer, GlobalBees.

Highlighting the market opportunity, the company said that India is seeing an uptick of smaller brands with nearly 120,000 new vendors selling on Amazon India. Of this, over 4,200 brands have crossed ₹1 crore in sales in 2020 alone, said GlobalBees.

GlobalBees is already in the process of integrating over 10 digitally native brands in the country.

Maheshwari and Agarwal had earlier co-founded e-learning platform, Brainvisa Technologies back in 2000.

“India is at the cusp of a direct-to-consumer revolution with estimated market size of $200 billion in the next 5 years. Indian brands have shown great promise in recent years, and we believe that GlobalBees is building great assets to accelerate the growth of digitally native brands in the country,” said Vikas Agnihotri, operating partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers.

At present, GlobalBees has offices in New Delhi and Bengaluru and will leverage the presence of FirstCry in the international market for both sourcing and distribution, it said in a statement.

Earlier this year, Myntra and Medlife executive Ananth Narayanan founded Mensa Brands, a Thrasio-style venture, and raised $50 million as part of its Series A led by the likes of Accel, Falcon Edge Capital and Norwest Venture Partners.

This article was first published on livemint.com.