Co-founder and Chief Business Officer, ShopClues | Founded 2011 | Gurugram
In January 2016, an online marketplace that sold unbranded goods to small-town India announced a new round of funding and a valuation of $1.1 billion. Its co-founder, Radhika Aggarwal, was widely described as the first Indian woman to enter the country’s unicorn club.
Less than four years later, the same company was sold in an all-stock deal reportedly worth well under a tenth of that figure.
This is the story of both halves: how ShopClues was built, how it fell, and what Radhika did next.
Ten schools and a father who left the army
Radhika grew up as what she has called an “army brat”. Her father served in the Indian Army, and the family moved often. She told YourStory in 2016 that she went to 10 different schools across India, and that the constant moving taught her basic life and social skills early.
After he left the army, her father started a business of his own. That gave Radhika an early look at what running a business involved.
She completed a postgraduate degree in advertising and public relations. In 1997 she started her own advertising agency, which Outlook Business reported was in Chandigarh, and ran it until 1999. She was candid with YourStory about her reason for starting it. “It arose from my desire to be my own boss,” she said.
Seattle, Wall Street and a fashion website
In 1999, Radhika moved to the United States to study for an MBA at Washington University in St. Louis. She joined Goldman Sachs in 2001, and then Nordstrom, the American department store chain, in 2002, where she stayed until early 2006. She has said that Nordstrom taught her strategic planning and its customer-first “inverted pyramid” culture, in which frontline staff come first.
From 2007 to 2009, she ran a fashion and lifestyle website called Fashion Clues on her own, aimed at South Asian and American audiences.
Her husband, Sandeep Aggarwal, was a Wall Street internet analyst. In 2011, the two of them, along with Sanjay Sethi, started a new company. ShopClues was set up in July 2011 under a US parent, Clues Network Inc, and run from Gurgaon with a team of about 10 people.
An online Chandni Chowk
India’s e-commerce market was already crowded. HerStory later described ShopClues as the 36th entrant. The founders chose to go where the bigger players were not looking: smaller cities and towns, and the large market for unbranded, everyday goods sold by small local merchants.
Sandeep described the idea to Quartz as “the Lajpat Nagar or Lamington Road of online marketplaces.” The press often called it an online Chandni Chowk. In its early years, its bestsellers included Chinese-made keychains and knives, and in 2015 it sold cow-dung cakes as part of a Diwali puja package.
From the start, ShopClues ran as a managed marketplace. Outside merchants listed and sold their goods, and the company handled much of the experience around them. Radhika was clear about the challenge with customers in these towns. “The customer is low on trust, and for very valid reasons,” she told YourStory.
She also described an early test. On the company’s first Valentine’s Day, a merchant backed out of 200 flower orders. ShopClues sent the customers soft toys and chocolates with an apology. Speaking about setbacks more broadly, she told YourStory: “How you react is the key test of character.”
In 2013, Sandeep stepped away from the company after he was charged with insider trading in the United States over his earlier work there. Sanjay Sethi became CEO, and Radhika ran the business side as Chief Business Officer.
A unicorn, and a woman at the table
The business grew quickly. Filings with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs showed revenue of about ₹31 crore in FY14, and ₹79 crore in a later year, YourStory reported in 2016. By the end of 2015, ShopClues had 3.5 lakh merchants, and the Economic Times reported around 5 lakh by mid-2016. By 2019, it said it had built a network of more than 7 lakh small and micro merchants, which made it one of India’s largest marketplaces by seller count.
In January 2016, ShopClues raised over $100 million in a Series E round led by Singapore’s GIC, with Tiger Global and Nexus Venture Partners. It announced a valuation of $1.1 billion. The Times of India questioned whether the round truly valued the company that high, Quartz later noted, but the figure stuck. Radhika became the face of a milestone: the first woman co-founder in India’s billion-dollar startup club. She went on to win several awards, including Outlook Business’s Woman of Worth.
The company was preparing to go public. “We are ready for an IPO by the end of this year,” she told YourStory in April 2017. At the same time, she said she wanted ShopClues to dominate “the unbranded, local, regional fashion market.”
The years things went wrong
The model that made ShopClues different also made it vulnerable. A marketplace built on lakhs of small, unorganised sellers was hard to police. In 2015, the Delhi High Court criticised ShopClues for continuing to sell Ray-Ban products after Luxottica accused it of selling fakes, the Economic Times reported. In 2018, L’Oréal India won a judgment against the company over counterfeits. Complaints about product quality followed the brand for years.
In March 2017, a private dispute became public. Sandeep, by then estranged from Radhika, made a series of allegations against her and Sethi on Facebook, and filed a criminal defamation case in Delhi, accusing them of downplaying his role in building the company, PTI reported. Radhika said she was shocked by the “unfounded and baseless allegations”. ShopClues’ board backed Radhika and Sethi, called Sandeep an ex-founder, and said the company had made “fantastic progress” under their leadership.
The IPO never happened. Analysts quoted by Quartz said ShopClues did not evolve its platform as buyers changed, and lacked the money to win new customers, while Amazon and Flipkart pushed deeper into smaller towns with better logistics and bigger discounts. Merger talks with several companies, including Snapdeal, came to nothing. TechCrunch reported that the Snapdeal talks had valued ShopClues at about $200 million. In 2019, reports said the company laid off more than 200 people and owed money to vendors.
Sold for a fraction
On 31 October 2019, Singapore-based Qoo10, which was backed by eBay, announced that it would acquire ShopClues in an all-stock deal. TechCrunch, citing people familiar with the matter, put ShopClues’ value at between $50 million and $80 million. The Economic Times reported a figure of about $70 million. Either way, more than 90% of its peak valuation was gone. NYU professor Anindya Ghose told Quartz it was “one of the biggest in India’s startup history.”
ShopClues had raised more than $250 million from investors over its life. By the end, it was handling more than 60,000 deliveries a day, according to TechCrunch, but it had lost the race.
Starting again with Kindlife
Radhika, who now uses the name Radhika Ghai, did not stay away from building for long. In September 2021, Entrackr reported that she had started a new company, kindlife.in, with Vidit Jain, a former marketing director at ShopClues. It was a marketplace for clean beauty, nutrition and home-care products, with a community where users could ask questions and share advice.
In late 2021, Kindlife raised a $2.5 million seed round led by Kalaari Capital, with Titan Capital and Java Capital. By June 2022, HerStory reported that it had more than 350 brands and a community of over 90,000 customers, 94% of them under 34.
Looking back on the early ShopClues days, she told HerStory that “starting ShopClues was an extremely risky move as there weren’t many startups around.” When another woman-led company, Purplle, became a unicorn, she said: “I remembered the feeling of super-excitement when ShopClues became one.”
In August 2024, Kindlife raised $8 million in a Series A round led by JB-Dooeun TK Fund and MIXI Global Investments, with Kalaari Capital also taking part, Entrackr reported. Radhika runs it as Founder and CEO, with co-founders Vidit Jain and Manasa Garemella. The company now focuses on beauty and wellness for Gen Z, with AI-driven recommendations and a push to bring Korean and Japanese beauty brands to India.
Her first company became a symbol of both the boom and the bust of Indian e-commerce. Her second is still being written.
Founder Journeys is a Sakhi Sangini series telling the stories of women who built businesses in India. This story is based on public interviews and reporting.
Sources: YourStory (October 2016; April 2017; June 2022); HerStory (June 2022); Outlook Business (October 2016); Business Standard/PTI (March 2017); Economic Times (August 2015; November 2018; December 2019); TechCrunch (October 2019); Quartz (November 2019); Entrackr (September 2021; August 2024).
