Nitin Chhabra successfully raised over $50 million for his tech-native retail company, ace turtle, securing funding from various top-tier investors like.
Nitin Chhabra successfully raised over $50 million for his tech-native retail company, ace turtle, securing funding from various top-tier investors like CapitaLand, Vertex Ventures, and SBI Investment Co. Ltd. The funding allowed ace turtle to scale sustainably by using a mix of equity and debt, while also maintaining alignment between investor expectations and business growth.
The most important aspect of the hiring strategy is identify the key roles which matter the most for you to succeed in that business. That could be anything. And for those roles, hire the best people. [Music] All righty. Hello everyone and welcome to the dealmaker show. So today we have a really exciting founder joining us. You know, a really remarkable journey. He's been at it now for over a decade, you know, with his company, you know, like in the startup world that's like a hundred years, you know, equivalent to corporate. So there's going to be a lot of stories, a lot of building, scaling, financing, you know, that we're going to be hearing whether he's on the equity side, on the debt side. But uh very exciting you know his his journey how he started you know as a non techch co-founders how he also went about recruiting the early team as well as uh you know as we said raising the
money but then also jumping from corporate to entrepreneurship they were getting some of the biggest pay jobs you know salaries at the time so again everything learned during the journey many years so brace yourself for a very inspiring conversation today and without further ado let's welcome our guest guest today, Nitin Chabra. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Alejandro, and thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. So, originally born in Punjab, but I know that you moved quite early in your in your life. So, give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up for you? Yes, you're right. I was born in a city called Jalander, which is in the state of Punjab in northern India. And then um very early on I moved to um Delhi because my father was a banker and he used to get transferred because of his jobs. And um I grew up in Delhi. I did my schooling graduation uh
my masters uh in Delhi and I started working in um uh Delhi itself. I was fortunate enough to start my career with Uni Liver India. Um it's um it's a different business as compared to where we are today but there's a lot we learned uh you know from uh that company. It was a it was it was a great company to uh you know have on early on in your career. And um post that I actually met uh you know one of the gatherings of uh uni liver was at the head of the PR and communications of uni liver and his son was visiting him from Bangalore and his son happened to be the uh head of recruitment of a company called Arvind which at that point of time was considered uh the pioneer in um retail fashion retail and that company's background was that they were into textiles and they thought okay let's do forward integration and we start you know a fashion retail business and we got talking he told me that
okay why don't you meet me tomorrow let me take you around to show you what retail is all about uh and we'll have a discussion you know if you like it I went to the few stores with them it was very very interesting for me and before I knew in a two weeks time I was sitting across with the CEO of that company uh and fortunately for me they hired me and that's how my journey started from uh Shard in Fashion Retail. So that was and I moved to uh and was in Delhi initially and uh within the first 6 months uh they moved me to Bangalore which was their uh head office and I spent about 8 years uh with them slightly more than 8 years and then uh my boss who was a CEO at that point of time uh he was joining another company to set up a fashion retail business for them and he asked me to join him. So I joined as the founding team of that business but uh with this was with the largest company in
India which was into oil and gas which is uh was getting into retail uh they were into all they were into telecom they were into all large businesses it is India's um largest company um u by market cap and by revenue as well even today and um so it was interesting so the way we thought about it was that okay we get to do something of our own but of course you know the difficult uh challenges of capital um and you know all those issues will get taken care of because uh we're going to with this huge um company we're going to set up a retail business here. So um I worked with them for about close to 5 years and um towards the end of my journey with them I just started feeling that you know I was kind of uh you know not finding the job challenging enough uh if I have to put into uh you know the words I was not really jumping out of the bed to go to the office right and that was what do you
think what do you think was causing that I think uh I just felt uh you know it was a very similar playbook where the brand names kept changing And we were you know doing the same thing and at that point of time we were focusing on the premium end of the market in fashion where we were looking at Bristol luxury and luxury brands even some high street high premium brands but the challenge in India were largely around uh how do you grow because uh business was mostly offline and uh the retail real estate was hard to come by and whatever quality retail real estate we had the surrounding infrastructure to that was you know very very difficult for the consumers to have a good experience to come into the mall itself or come into the high street itself to shop. So, so that was you know curtailing our growth uh and uh there was no scale right so there were multiple brands multiple businesses but
they were not really uh scaling enough and at that point of time uh you know e-commerce had just started showing some early results and that seemed very fascinating for me I still remember that one of the early fashion retailers uh which was Myntra in India and Myntra is like um you know um they were just focused on the vertical player only focused on fashion e-commerce. So they came to us and they wanted one of our brands and I asked them their ASP and their ASP was at that point of time if I to just convert into US dollars was uh $10 that was average selling price on the platform and the brand which they were you know asking me which was in our portfolio of that company at that point of time and that brand's you know starting price points was about close to $80. So I said okay how will this work? But they were very sure they were very confident about it and I uh you know started the
business uh with them. Um and I was very surprised. We didn't get large volumes but we got orders from very small cities tier 2 tier three towns uh you know u which were not even in the 15ear business plan of the brand which we were talking about. So that seemed very interesting to me. Why? So this gave me actually uh you know insight that yes there are pockets of customers who are all over India. They might not be clustered. So it's very difficult to reach them through the traditional retail store offline model. But e-commerce could be a way to reach those customers. At the same time you know India um at that time was going through retail revolution where um customers did not understand the brands as well. So uh what uh brands were next to you mattered to who you were because that's how they would say okay this is this kind of a brand uh so which we realized that and then you know touch
and feel was important for the customers because they were still trying to discover the brands so we said okay then uh you know offline is going to be important as well so we needed something which will be a combination of two and as part of my role in that company I was handling uh multiple roles being a you know senior person there I was uh heading uh you uh joint ventures for them. At the same time, I was also responsible for uh international business development. So, what that meant uh was that I was also responsible for forming joint ventures or long-term partnership with international brands to launch them in India. And this gave me an opportunity to meet the leadership of those international brands both European as well as American and uh they would share with me how e-commerce was impacting the business. U some were very excited about it. uh some were concerned uh quite a few of
them were kind of dismissing it as being a fad and uh not it's not going to sustain. So that seemed very fascinating to me and I would always when I would travel I'll spend some more time to uh you know meet people in that industry which who were on the e-commerce side some people who in the tech side were more on the tech enablement side for e-commerce and and that was very fascinating to me and I felt that this could be the answer for uh India where you know if we could integrate online and offline at that point of time those technologies were not there and or rather I would say technology is always there but I think there were no companies is focusing on that side of the business. So we said okay what we will do is as a business model which I thought of that point of time is that we will integrate the online and offline environments. The word OMI channel was coined much later uh you
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