The US, China, and India Take Lion’s Share Of Funding To Global E-Commerce Startups

USA, India, and China are the top markets for funding to e-commerce startups. Together, they account for 62% of global deals and 71% of total funding going to e-commerce startups.

With over 950 e-commerce deals, the US drives 5x more deals than India and China, but US deals tend to be smaller funding rounds. China actually drives a slightly higher share of global funding than the US, despite accounting for just 9% of global deal flow. A few more data points:

• Chinese e-commerce companies received the most funding, about $9.9B dollars over 188 total deals. This is a higher total funding amount than the US market, and translates to $53M per deal. That’s also a considerably higher average deal size than what the US and India are seeing.
• The US market has seen $9.8B invested over 962 deals, for an average of $10M per deal, less than one-fifth of China’s deal size. That said, the US market drives extremely high deal volume and accounted for 45% of global deals.
• India lags the two leading markets, with $5.6B invested over 184 deals, for an average of $30M per deal, which is about 3x the deal size seen in the US market, but significantly smaller than the deal size of China.
• Other major players are Germany with $2.8B invested over 168 deals, and the UK with $1.2B invested over 98 deals.

The chart below shows each of the major countries’ breakdown of deal type by dollar share, revealing an emphasis on late-stage funding in several markets.

• The US market saw an even distribution with about 34% of dollars going to late-stage investments, and 21% to early-stage rounds (somewhat bucking the general global trend toward lopsided dollar-share held by the late stage).
• In India, about 66% of total dollars went to late-stage investments in companies such as Flipkart, Quickr, and Snapdeal. This is a lot higher than the regular distribution to late-stage investments. Additionally, only 4% of dollar funding went to early-stage investments.
• China and Germany had a similar and more usual investment-stage distribution with around a 40% dollar-share for late-stage investments, and less than a 10% share for early-stage investments. Some major late-stage Chinese investments include Jingdong,  Dianping and Uxin Pai.

Note: For this analysis, we focused solely on companies selling physical goods. We excluded e-commerce startups focused on services or digital goods (e.g., video, apps, and music).

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Feature image credit: Joachim Huber. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.