GoKwik: Hearing The Consumer Out

Coming from a business family, one would be expected to carry the legacy forward exclusively. However, Chirag Taneja, CEO, GoKwik, took the plunge and decided to start from the ground up and build his enterprise. This is how GoKwik, a platform for solving online shopping experiences took shape.  

“My journey of becoming an entrepreneur has been very exciting and uplifting. GoKwik is the third startup for me after almost a decade of entrepreneurial experience across fintech, consumer, e-commerce journeys, and extensive experience across 3Cs – content, community, commerce,” Taneja says.

“GoKwik began in the middle of the pandemic. It’s a tech data science layer for the NANF world. It looked to address some major problems that direct to consumer (D2C) brands and the e-commerce industry, in general, were facing. We also knew that D2C brands were becoming customer-preferred brands so enhancing customer experience became imperative,” he adds. Elaborating on his business model, Taneja says, “We decided to combine tech, data and user experience and solve hard-hitting problems in the D2C space.”

To date, the company has raised upwards of $50 million from global investors such as Sequoia, Matrix, RTP Global. It is also backed by marquee angels such as Revant Bhate, Jiten Gupta, Utsav Somani, Dhyanesh Shah, Nitin Gupta, Amit Lakhotia, Manish Vij, Sid Puri, Ramakant, Anurag. GoKwik has a success-oriented pricing model which is based on take rate. It works with more than 250 brands ranging across D2C, offline players and marketplaces and processes GMV of more than $500 million.  

However, the company has faced many challenges which range from starting a company during a pandemic to solving a very hard data-driven problem which begins with ensuring the availability of valid data. Not only this, finding product-market fit is rare and is always a challenge in the startup world. They have been committed to listening to merchant needs and solving for them and successfully overcoming his issues.  

Talking about his journey, Taneja says, “Our mission is to make shopping and D2C synonyms of each other. We want to be a reliant e-commerce enabler that helps merchants provide better shopping experience across the funnel – discovery, selection, conversion and retention.”