Bringing life to hyperlocal shopfronts.One pin at a time

Founded 2015

Partnered 2017

Currently Series D

In 2017, the consensus was that offline retail is obsolete. In the e-commerce euphoria, brick-and-mortar shops were awaiting the apocalypse. VC dollars funded discounts, which fragmented retail couldn’t compete with. The coupon economy did not work, so Groupon exited India. Malls grabbed aspirational spending wallet share. But Anshoo had a different read. What if the neighbourhood nodes are brought alive as a connected graph on mobile? Shops would go digital, discovery would trigger dopamine, and discounts would be a habit.

Anshoo Sharma

Naman Mawandia

Anshoo Sharma & Naman Mawandia · Magicpin

"WaterBridge has been a source of sage advice and constant support for us - a true partner in building Magicpin"

Total Raised $100M

Active Users 15M+

Retailer Footprint 200K+

ONDC Orders Daily 150K

Why we backed it

Performance marketing for the $1T neighbourhood retail economy

Except that India’s retailers are tired of clicks. They want business. The overwhelming majority of Indian retail is offline, in the dark, with no data and no tools. The biggest market in India, and nobody had switched the lights on. Until Magicpin did. The smallest of the retailers come alive on the platform, attracting traffic that had no idea of their existence. In a world of online-only zeitgeists, Anshoo picked the side of supposed underdogs. And the Davids refuse to lose.

01 · Founders

Investors who saw it coming and crossed over.

As a VC, Anshoo had identified the neglected local retail opportunity. Instead of waiting for horses to back, he became the jockey himself.

02 · Market

Make the 100-year-old local supply chain social, on mobile

For many, shopping is social therapy, a form of connection. When mobile took away the joy of stepping out to shop, Magicpin wired shoppers to go back to the high street.

03 · Wedge

Show up. Purchase. Get rewarded.

Upload your bill from a local outlet, earn rewards. This system drove footfall to brick-and-mortar stores. The offline world never felt out of the game.

The champion that every local retailer deserved, but never got

2015

Boulevard of Broken Dreams, for offline retail

Capital was chasing everything e-commerce. Anshoo stood up for the overlooked offline. Started with a Facebook campaign requesting people to send their store bills and a selfie in exchange for a free mobile recharge. People did it. The MVP broke trying to process 100+ transactions on day one.
2017

High streets light up in every City of Stars

Raises Series A from WaterBridge and Lightspeed. The bill-upload rewards engine scales. Goes horizontal, adds fashion, beauty and electronics verticals. Lane by lane, the once-dark offline retail map turns into a constellation of lit-up shops shining brightly, online.
2020

The Sound of Silence: the model goes dark overnight

Anshoo writes to his investors that Magicpin would have its best month ever. After 3 days, lockdown threatened Magicpin's existence. All the store lights went off at once. The company’s sole purpose of existence was crippled overnight. Not enough cash in the bank either. Magicpin had hit its lowest point.
2021

Leave a Light On, for the returning shoppers

Starts food deliveries, introduces Magic Order, builds delivery muscle. Partners are now online, receiving direct digital payments, remotely. They are given free tools to create online ordering links, take payments, and arrange deliveries. Each shuttered kirana was handed a small light to keep itself glowing. Raises $60M Series D.
2023

Firework, with ONDC

Largest seller app on the ONDC with 70K+ restaurants serving 150K daily food orders. Builds magicFleet to give small logistics entrepreneurs a tech-enabled stack. No longer just one lit shopfront. Every light on the network starts twinkling, all at once.
2025–today

All of the Lights: the connected graph starts humming

Scales to 100+ Tier 2 towns. Hands out Vera AI as agentic assistance for small businesses. Launches 15-minute hyperlocal food delivery feature, MagicNOW. Drives ₹1,000Cr business to 6K fashion apparel retailers. Becomes the default operating layer for the long tail of high-street stores that no platform will ever index.

A WaterBridge note

Every single startup success has at least one near-death experience. If they're lucky, they'd survive 2. SpaceX had 3. Magicpin is no different. 2020 was that moment. All offline shops went off-grid across not just one, but several national lockdowns. Most founders would have gone off-grid and stayed home too. Not Anshoo. He stepped out and rebuilt Magicpin for the post-pandemic era.

They shipped the home delivery module and brought the shops to customers’ doorsteps. At a time when all the chips were down, Anshoo pulled off a hand that no one expected. Was it luck? Some of it, undeniably. But most of it was sheer will.

We had not underwritten a black swan event like Covid. Nobody did. We underwrote the contrarian thesis (at that time) that the $1T Indian offline retail would not just survive but thrive if it became digital-literate. We underwrote Anshoo, who deeply understood the on-the-ground nuances of retail.

Anshoo excelled at a lot more than what our Series A IC note noted. We’re privileged to have seen that grit firsthand. Infusing capital at Magicpin’s every funding round is only a means to fulfilling our side of the promise. The real joy is in celebrating him and his incredible team.