EarnWealth Grabs $500K in Pre-Series Funding
Social commerce FinTech startup EarnWealth recently raised Rs 3.5 crore ($500,000) in Pre-Series A funding at a valuation of Rs 50 crore (more than $6.6 million), according to a YourStory report on Monday (Oct. 11).
EarnWealth, which was launched in 2014 by Rajesh P. Nair, creates micro-entrepreneurs, or “Mahalakshmi,” in financial services. It offers what Nair calls “an assisted journey” to FinTech customers across the physical and digital space and helps them complete their transactions.
With the money raised in the recent funding round, EarnWealth plans to continue growing its micro-entrepreneurs network, add new products and team up with new financial institutions (FIs).
EarnWealth started its journey seven years ago as a B2B distributor for financial products and added a social commerce component in 2020 to assist in the distribution of personal loans. The Mahalakshmi model is targeted at educated homemakers in India with the goal of helping them launch their own financial consulting firms.
An Android application called Kamate Raho helps these micro-entrepreneurs get trained on customer acquisition. There are about 100 Mahalakshmis working on the platform, and EarnWealth hopes to add 10,000 within the next year.
Related news: Social Media Influencers, Once Mocked, Now ‘A Core Strategy’ for Brands
As social commerce continues to grow across retail, influencer marketing “has become more and more a core strategy as part of brands’ integrated marketing mix,” Stacy DeBroff, founder and CEO of Influence Central, told PYMNTS.
That’s especially true as Apple, Google and other companies continue to move away from tracking users and as consumers are blocking ads.
“It’s a space where you can see all the different trends in the market converging to create this moment in time where the very fundamental marketing paradigms for brands are shifting,” DeBroff said. “And influencers happen to be in the whirlpool [as the] centerpiece — that one key component.”
Social commerce sales are up more than 35% to $36.6 billion this year, according to eMarketer, and is expected to reach almost $80 billion annually in sales by 2025.
Social commerce channels for eCommerce platform Shopify grew 76% from February 2020 and February 2021, with more than half (54%) of consumers ages 18 to 34 finding brands on social media and 28% making purchases on one or more of those platforms.