Social commerce platform DealShare raised $ 45 million from the wholly owned subsidiary of Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA), as part of a larger funding round.

According to the reports, the $ 210 million round includes investors like Tiger Global, Dragoneer Investments Group, Kora Capital, Unilever Ventures, and Alpha Wave Global.

Reports suggest that, the DealShare is now valued at over $ 1.7 billion. It will use the funds to strengthen technology, product innovations, and hiring.

DealShare was Found in 2018 by Rajat Shikhar, Sankar Bora, Sourjyendu Medda and Vineet Rao, sells daily essentials and targets the middle-income demographic through a community group buying model.

“We will be utilizing the funds from our Series E round to strengthen our customer base and technology capabilities,” says Vineet Rao.

“We aim to democratize online shopping for Bharat users with unmatched service and experience by developing innovative products and tech solutions. This will be supported by building our teams across the country and hiring new tech talent at all levels,” adds Rao.

Sourjyendu Medda says, “i think we had a very different thesis to social commerce. We always believed social commerce will only work if it is deployed in the grocery space. For social commerce to work we need virality in the mass consumers. That will only happen when the deals are relevant to the larger population.”

“Through the community-led virality model, the company has been able to restrict the fulfilment cost —warehousing and last mile — to 5-6 percentage of the order cost compared to 20 percentage or above for traditional e-commerce,” adds Medda.

Medda says, “these big differentiators we will continue to retain, we are possibly the fastest growing ecommerce company. We are already close to a $1 billion revenue run rate now. At the same time, we burn very little. We are very close to operational profitability.”