Amazon India on Friday launched a new initiative called ‘Amazon Wings’ to help its sellers raise funds through the crowdfunding platform Ketto.

With this initiative, Amazon India aims to help small sellers with early-stage ideas raise funds for product development.

The company will also help the sellers reach out to a larger market and support them with marketing activities, Gopal Pillai, Vice-President, Seller Services, Amazon India, told BusinessLine .

“We have over 4,50,000 sellers on our platform in India. Many of these are very small set-ups that are also working on their own products. We want to help them with access to capital, and foster innovation and faster new product innovation,” Pillai said.

Early-stage products

Amazon India already runs a programme called Launchpad that helps product start-ups get a wider reach on the platform.

According to Pillai, the Amazon Wings initiative will run in parallel and focus more on start-ups still in the prototyping stage.

“There have been a lot of great ideas that couldn’t raise funding through traditional means, including through venture capitalists who aren’t sure of early-stage ideas. We will help such start-ups in not only raising money, but also in telling their stories the right way,” Kunal Kapoor, Indian actor and co-founder of Ketto, said.

“We’ll also help them create prototypes to show before they start raising funds on our platform,” he added. Ketto will offer its platform at a subsidy for such start-ups.

For typical fundraising intiaitives, the platform charges a 5 per cent fee. However, for Amazon Wings, start-ups will have to shell out a 2.5 per cent commission. Nothing additional will be paid to Amazon for enabling this initiative.

For more matured sellers, Amazon also has a lending platform where lenders compete to offer loans to sellers.

However, the initiative is an invite-only offer, wherein based on sellers’ past records, automatic loan offers are sent out.

Small-ticket funds

Amazon India has launched a dedicated microsite to feature these fundraisers initiated by sellers.

This programme will enable sellers to raise small- ticket funds, starting from as little as ₹50,000, by crowdfunding.

Amazon sellers can apply to Ketto for fundraisers in various categories, such as business or community development, innovation or business expansion.

Amazon will solicit interest from sellers to apply to Ketto for participation in the programme. The applications will then be shortlisted by Ketto on the basis of the seller story, purpose for the fundraiser and the goal amount. Once shortlisted, a team of experts from Ketto will guide the sellers from the ideation stage to the final launch of the campaign.

After the fundraiser is launched, the shortlisted sellers will be able to promote it in their social circle. Additionally, Amazon, along with Ketto, will also actively market the microsite through email and social media.

Ketto hopes to increase its scale through the initiative. The crowdfunding platform has so far raised only ₹320 crore, mostly for social welfare initiatives. But with Amazon, it hopes to reach a larger scale.

“We are excited about the Amazon Wings initiative, as it allows us to reach out to a community of verified small businesses with genuine needs towards business expansion and innovation,” Zaheer Adenwala, Co-founder and CTO at Ketto, said.

Amazon has already begun a pilot with five start-ups trying to raise funds on the platform. It is now in the process of reaching out to a wider audience for large-scale adoption.

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