Mainstreet Marketplace, a sneaker reselling platform, has closed a $2 million (roughly Rs 16 crore) seed funding round led by Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal’s First Lap LLP, Zerodha co-founders Nikhil Kamath and Abhijeet Pai’s venture fund Gruhas Proptech, Udaan co-founder Sujeet Kumar, Spotify India MD Amarjit Singh Batra, and several other angel investors and social media influencers.
Mainstreet Marketplace, founded by 24-year-old Vedant Lamba as a YouTube channel in 2017, had last year attracted pre-seed funding of over $1,25,000 (roughly Rs 1 crore) from angel investors, including Cred founder Kunal Shah.
Lamba told ET exclusively, “We’re deploying the funds towards hiring an experienced senior management team, expanding our brick-and-mortar presence in more cities, and improving the quality of our customer experience.”
Mainstreet, according to Lamba, is a customer-to-business-to-customer (C2B2C) marketplace similar to Olx, Spinny, CarDekho, and others, but for status-driven goods. “We’re playing a status game.” For us, trainers are the first piece of the jigsaw. “We’re determining what comes next in the market for status-driven commodities,” he continued.
The Mainstreet Marketplace platform sells labels like Nike, Adidas, Yeezy, Supreme, and Drewhouse, and it claims to have an elite clientele that includes Bollywood celebs like Ranbir Kapoor, Karan Johar, and Ranveer Singh.
The Mumbai-based company generates revenue from commissions on the resale of prized trainers, which have found a significant market for collectors — both globally and in India — who pay high cash for these products throughout the years. A pair of sneakers on Mainstreet ranges in price from Rs 8,999 to Rs 8,24,999.
Some of these products, particularly limited edition shoes, see their costs rise over time. Mainstreet Marketplace competes in this area with VegNonVeg, Superkicks, and a number of other individuals who resell these products.
“We are extremely bullish on consumption as a sector.” Investing in a firm is frequently synonymous with investing in the person who manages the organization. Vedant is a buddy as well as one of the smartest young operators we’ve met in a long time. ”I’m excited to be on this adventure with him,” Kamath added.
