Wikimart.ru closed a second round of financing with US venture fund Tiger Global partners, reported Wikimart founders Maxim Faldin and Kamil Kurmakaev yesterday to Russian business daily Vedomosti.
Since its launch in 2008, Wikimart has developed an impressive e-commerce platform inspired by such models as Japan’s Rakuten, Latin America’s Mercado Libre and Amazon’s Marketplace. Wikimart hosts thousands of offline and online merchants who use the site as an additional sales channel. Wikimart takes a 2% to 9% commission on the amount of each purchase. Orders can be delivered anywhere in Russia from Wikimart’s warehouse near Moscow.
In early March, the site claimed to offer 532,642 different items from 2,281 merchants. Total sales amounted to $2.5 million in December 2010, placing Wikimart among leading e-commerce sites in Russia.
Among Wikimart’s direct or indirect competitors are the marketplaces of Yandex (Yandex.Market), Ozon.ru (Torgovaya ploshchadka in Russian) and the Mail.ru Group (Torg.ru) as well as Tiu.ru and smaller sites like Iferta or Runivermag.
According to estimates, the Russian e-commerce market is valued anywhere from $5 to $10 billion a year, but with annual growth estimated at 40%, it could reach the scale of current West-European e-commerce in five years.
Tiger Global Management had already invested $5 million in Wikimart in 2010 and another $10 million in online travel sales site Anywayanyday.ru. The fund also has shares in Yandex, Russia’s leading search engine, and formerly held a stake in Mail.ru, a leading email service and portal.
