🚀$400k Seed Funding Round For FreeStand

The funding round was led by Venture Catalysts and Nocking Point Advisors, along with participation from the IIM-Calcutta Innovation Park and SucSEED Indovation.

We are a Seed-stage startup serving Fortune 500 🚀

Super thrilled to announce the raise of our Second round of funding at FreeStand Sampling. Building a startup is a super challenging but deeply satisfying process reaching milestones allows us to look back and notice all the mistakes we have made in the past. I am deeply grateful to the entire team at FreeStand and all our supporters and investors who cheer us on in our journey!

We are excited to welcome Venture Catalysts++ | India's 1st Multi-Stage VC, Nocking Point Advisors, Guneet Singh and Varun Hooda as our brand new backers and would like to thank SucSEED Ventures, IIM Calcutta Innovation Park and Abhishek Marla for their continued support!

Dr. Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, MD and CEO of Venture Catalysts said, “We are thrilled to announce our investment in FreeStand. As per various industry sources, in India, an estimated 20,000 products are sampled annually. With each brand distributing an average 300,000 samples across online and offline sales channels, this market is expected to grow to $1.5 billion - $3 billion by 2027 and this allows FreeStand’s innovative platform to emerge as a game-changer, offering a seamless and data-driven approach to executing sampling campaigns.” 

We have gained traction among major FMCG players like HUL, Nestle, Reckitt Benckiser, L’Oreal, Nivea, Piramal Healthcare, Cipla Health, and Emami.

FreeStand's capabilities extend across multiple channels like Ad-Networks, E-Commerce, and QuickCommerce. With the new capital, the company plans to expand its offerings to include event and retail sampling channels and leverage AI to enhance and simplify the product experience for FMCG marketers.

Konark Sharma, Co-Founder and CEO of FreeStand shared, “FreeStand’s tech supercharges what FMCG brands can accomplish with product sampling. Brands today can utilise the FreeStand platform to sample across multiple channels like Ad-Networks, E-Commerce and Quick Commerce, with the help of this capital we will be expanding our offering to include event and retail sampling channels. We will also be leveraging AI capabilities to enhance and further simplify our product experience for FMCG marketers.”

Sneh Soni, Co-Founder and Head of Business Operations at FreeStand further added, “Setting up a sampling campaign takes at least 20-30 days for an FMCG brand today, with the help of the FreeStand platform, brands are now able to find the right sampling channel/partner in less than 3 minutes. We’re excited to have the backing of Vcats, and Nocking Point in this round, and this capital will help us further expand our data and integrations with various sampling channel partners to enable FMCG brands to gain a greater ROI from their sampling campaigns.” 

Kavach Chandra, CTO and Co-Founder said, “Sampling, today is one of the most effective ways of getting your product to the right consumer. Tech allows us to capture and encapsulate the scale of all that is possible with this marketing activity and with this capital, we will unlock new and higher levels of scale, bringing intelligence to the entire ecosystem of sampling for all the stakeholders involved.”

Now back to building 💪🏽