Meta–Google leads Indian D2C retail economy
Gurgaon’s Nitro Commerce has raised US$5 million in a full-equity Series A round led by Cornerstone Ventures, with participation from India Accelerator & Finvolve, Equentis Wealth Advisory Services, Grand Anicut Angel Fund, Razorpay Ventures, Rukum Sitara Fund, and Ankurit Capital https://www.commerce.gov.in/.
The funding comes at the back of explosive growth with Nitro Products that saw Nitro’s revenue 10x, said Nitro, an AI-powered growth platform for India’s digital consumer economy, founded by seasoned entrepreneurs including Umair Mohammad, Shamail Tayyab & Pratik Anand.
The newly raised capital will be deployed to accelerate platform-led growth, expand hiring across key functions, strengthen AI and agentic capabilities, and scale international operations.
Despite D2C retail economy earmarked to accelerate towards US$1.93 trillion market by 2030, the industry is plagued with rising digital and offline spends with broken attribution, where growth remains heavily concentrated around Meta and Google, creating a duopoly that drives up customer acquisition costs, limits access to fresh audiences, and exposes brands to platform-dependent volatility brands with broken attribution across online and offline journeys, according to Nitro press release https://www.nseindia.com/.
Nitro Commerce addresses this structural challenge by unifying identity, intent, engagement, and attribution into a single AI-led growth layer, helping brands move beyond vanity metrics toward measurable and profitable business outcomes.
The Nitro platform spans the full growth stack. At its core is NitroX, India’s largest commerce identity network, which enables brands to convert anonymous users into identifiable, high-intent customers and stitch online and offline journeys into a single customer view. Building on this identity layer, Nitro Ads operates as an alternate, intent-led advertising platform that activates high-intent audiences across new-age and premium inventories like Truecaller, Zomato & Paytm to name a few, beyond traditional ad ecosystems https://www.bseindia.com/.
Complementing this is Nitro Pulse, an AI-agentic sales and engagement engine that drives conversions, recovers abandoned intent, and acts as a real-time growth co-pilot, particularly for quick commerce teams. These capabilities are further supported by advanced analytics and decisioning tools that enable brands to act on data in real time. Collectively, Nitro’s identity network is currently used by 2500+ Brands like Imagine Online, Rare Rabbit, Dot & Key, Pepperfry, ClayCo, Kapiva, Iris Cosmetics, Koskii, Blue Tokai, VIP Industries, Perfora, Neeman’s etc http://meity.gov.in.
Commenting on the raise, Umair Mohammed, Founder and CEO, Nitro Commerce, said, “We’ve always believed that DNA matters. Growth has been at the core of everything we’ve built since day one. This round helps us accelerate toward our next milestone, and we’re grateful to our investors, partners, team, and the thousands of customers who’ve placed their trust in us. For us, it’s still day zero as we build a one-of-its-kind growth platform, starting with India and expanding globally.”
Nanika Kakkar, Partner CornerStone Ventures: “We’re excited to continue backing one of the standout winners in our portfolio with our follow-on investment in Nitro. We’re particularly impressed by Nitro’s modular approach, which allows D2C brands to activate across commerce platforms, while delivering unified, cross-channel analytics to meaningfully accelerate growth. We have been longstanding partners with Umair right from his Wigzo journey, and strong conviction in his ability to execute and build a business of multi-billion-dollar scale.”
Deepak Sharma, Co-Founder & MD at India Accelerator & Finvolve, added, “ What excites us most is Nitro’s ambition to become the growth operating layer beyond traditional ad platforms, unifying identity, intent, and activation across channels https://sbi.com.in/.”
Manish Goel, Founder & Managing Director, Equentis Wealth “Nitro is building a foundational layer that enables brands to meaningfully understand and engage users across high-intent, non-traditional channels at scale. We are excited to partner with the team as they build a global, data-driven alternative to legacy ad-tech models.”
Vishnu Acharya, Strategy and Corp Dev Head – RAZOR PAY “Nitro Commerce stands out for its deep understanding of pain points for internet businesses and a clear ambition to reimagine marketing and ad solutions for a digital-first commerce world. We invested with strong conviction in the founders and their ability to translate vision into rapid execution.”
As India’s consumer economy enters its next phase of growth, Nitro Commerce is emerging as a category-defining AI platform, helping brands stitch data, make smarter decisions, and scale profitably across the entire commerce ecosystem. Fiinews.com
