Contlo plans to use the freshly raised funds to scale its product capabilities, RnD and expand its go-to-market (GTM) operations

Contlo, a Delaware & Bengaluru-based customer data and marketing platform for e-commerce and direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands has raised $3.5 million in its seed funding round. This round was led by Kae Capital with participation from Better Capital and Titan Capital. The round also saw participation from prominent angel investors including Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar (Founders of Razorpay), top D2C brand founders like Varun Alagh of MamaEarth, Arjun Vaidya (Co-founder of V3 Ventures and ex-founder Dr. Vaidya’s), Varun Sadana of SuperTails, Varun Vohra of Akna medical, Vikram Khandpur(CPO of Sinch), Srinivas Anumolu(Co-founder of BigBites and ex-founder Upwork & TutorVista), Giridhar Malpani (Founder of Climber Capital) and other angels including operators from global tech companies like Snowflake, Apple, etc. This news comes eight months after the company successfully raised $800K in pre-seed funding in January 2022.

Founded by Ishaan Bhola and Mukunda NS in Oct 2021, Contlo enables ecommerce and DTC brands to accelerate their sales growth, drive revenue generation and automate personalized experiences for its customers using ecommerce centric omnichannel customer engagement.

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“We are empowering brands to move away from the conventional big-tech advertising and marketplace models towards taking their destinies into their own hands by building direct channels.”

— Ishaan Bhola

Contlo’s AI-first approach combined with omnichannel customer engagement across Email, SMS, Whatsapp, Mobile & Web Push makes the shopping experience highly personalized for end customers.

Contlo is purpose-built for deep ecommerce use cases via seamless integration with leading ecommerce platforms like Shopify, Custom stacks Magento, BigCommerce, Wix and WooCommerce.

The start-up plans to deploy the fresh funds to strengthen its product capabilities, RnD, expand its go-to-market (GTM) operations and also in its global marketing agency-led partnership program. The company also plans to further its growth with increased marketing & sales activities, hiring across all teams and expansion into new international markets.

Further elaborating on Contlo’s expansion, the founder Ishaan Bhola stated “Marketing tech has been shackled by legacy tech and not much innovation has happened in last decade. But with our AI-first approach, we are reimagining how digitally native brands of the future will conduct commerce. We are leveraging AI to build hyper-personalized commerce experiences at internet scale”

“We believe SaaS software is getting rewritten due to 3 major tailwinds of AI, verticalization and PLG. Contlo sits at the intersection of these mega-trends and has built a powerful product backed by an extremely strong founding team which perfectly positions them to disrupt how marketing is done for brands.” said Gaurav Chaturvedi, Partner, Kae Capital.

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Talking about modern-day ecommerce problems and how Contlo can help brands tackle them, Ishaan also said “Ecommerce marketing has become highly sophisticated, vanilla generic marketing automation doesn’t work for ecommerce brands anymore. Our product offers instant time to value, unlocks commerce-centric use cases and drives 3x more revenue than generic horizontal tools using an AI-first approach”.

At present most DTC brands are struggling to acquire customers through Facebook and Google with rising CACs. Today’s digitally native brands need to have the capabilities to build their own infrastructure to understand their customers and leverage that understanding to orchestrate personalized commerce experiences.

Contlo is currently used by over 1000+ modern e-commerce and D2C brands across the globe such as XYXX, Himalaya Herbals, Symphony, Marico, Yoga bar, Rare Rabbit, The Man Company, G.O.A.T brand labs, Supertails, Jimmy’s Cocktails and Boult audio to name a few. The company has witnessed a massive growth of 50% MoM since its inception.

“We are empowering brands to move away from the conventional big-tech advertising and marketplace models towards taking their destinies into their own hands by building direct channels with their customers.“ Ishaan added.