ShopClues

E-commerceIndia

New to Unitard

🤝 Acquired

Peak $1.1 BillionToday

~-93%

from peak

🦄
Became a unicorn
2016
📈
Peak valuation
$1.1 Billion ’16
💔
Became a Unitard
2019
💸
Last valuation
~$77M

Current status

Acquired by Qoo10 (Singapore) in 2019 for under $100M in an all-stock fire sale.

The rise & fall

5 moments · 2011–2023

The key moments, with employee sentiment along the way.

2011

Founded for India's smaller towns

A marketplace for tier-2 and tier-3 India — the unbranded goods the big platforms ignored.

Inc42

Jan 2016

The peak: a $1.1B unicorn$1.1B

Tiger Global, Helion and Nexus back India's newest unicorn at $1.1B.

Inc42

2016–19

Amazon and Flipkart come to the small towns

ShopClues slashes marketing to chase profitability, GMV slumps, and repeated fundraising attempts fail — while a founder feud and an insider-trading case drain what confidence is left.

Entrackr

2019

Fire sale: acquired by Qoo10 for under $100M

All stock, no cash — a 90%-plus wipeout from the unicorn round three years earlier.

Entrackr

2020–23

From the inside · Glassdoor reviews, 2020–23

Glassdoor reviews from the years after the takeover described a diminished, slower-moving marketplace, with employees repeatedly citing appraisals and salary raises frozen for years at a company settled well below its unicorn-era peak.

💬 entries paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗; dated facts carry their source.

How it happened

ShopClues was an Indian online marketplace focused on smaller towns and unbranded goods, reaching unicorn status at a $1.1B valuation in January 2016 with backing from Tiger Global and Nexus.

As Amazon and Flipkart pushed into the same tier-2 and tier-3 markets, ShopClues slashed marketing to chase profitability, its gross merchandise value slumped, and repeated fundraising attempts failed. A founder feud and an insider-trading case further drained investor confidence, and in 2019 Singapore's Qoo10 acquired it in an all-stock deal valuing it at under $100M — a 90%-plus wipeout.

Source: Entrackr / Inc42 / e27 ($1.1B unicorn Jan 2016 incl. Tiger Global, Helion, Nexus; Qoo10 all-stock acquisition 2019 for under $100M, >90% wipeout)

Founders

Sanjay Sethi
Co-founder & CEO (from 2013)
Now Founder & CEO at CygnusAlphaLinkedIn ↗
Sandeep Aggarwal
co-founder (incorporated the company in 2011)
LinkedIn ↗
Radhika Aggarwal
co-founder & chief business officer
No public profile matched

Current roles as self-reported on LinkedIn, retrieved 2026-08-19. See our methodology.

Disclosed investors (11)

Historical funding participation; lists may be incomplete and do not establish current ownership or investor losses.

* Lead in a funding round · Crunchbase ↗ · 2026-10-13 · Methodology · Leaderboard