Mainstreet Marketplace, a platform for reselling sneakers, recently closed a $2 million seed funding round from a number of investors, including Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal's First Lap LLP, Zerodha co-founders Nikhil Kamath and Abhijeet Pai's venture fund Gruhas Proptech, Udaan co-founder Sujeet Kumar, Spotify India MD Amarjit Singh Batra, as well as other angel investors and social media influencers.

Vedant Lamba, 24, founded Mainstreet Marketplace as a YouTube channel in 2017. That same year, the company obtained pre-seed capital from angel investors, including Cred founder Kunal Shah, totaling around $1,25,000 (about Rs 1 lakh). According to Lamba, who spoke exclusively with us, "We're deploying the funds towards hiring an experienced senior management team, expanding our brick-and-mortar presence in more cities, and improving the quality of our customer experience."

Lamba, the company had revenues of Rs 24 crore at the end of FY22–23, and it anticipates having a topline of Rs 100 crore in FY23–24. The company presently operates two locations, one in each of Delhi and Mumbai, and by the end of the year, it hopes to have added six more. "As a company, we've been bootstrapping since day one. When it came to scaling, we had to be quite inventive. Lamba stated, "We never had any capital leverage. "With the help of this capital, we can grow by hiring more people and improving the customer experience."

For status-driven goods, Lamba views Mainstreet as a customer-to-business-to-customer (C2B2C) marketplace similar to Olx, Spinny, CarDekho, etc. "We're engaged in a status game. For us, the first piece of the jigsaw are trainers. We are determining the future of the market for status-driven commodities, he continued. The Mainstreet Marketplace platform claims to have an exclusive audience that includes Bollywood celebs like Ranbir Kapoor, Karan Johar, Ranveer Singh, etc. and provides labels like Nike, Adidas, Yeezy, Supreme, and Drewhouse.

The Mumbai-based business makes money from commissions on the resale of collectible trainers, which have developed a sizable market for collectors over the years who are willing to pay top cash for these goods both internationally and in India. The price of a pair of trainers on Mainstreet ranges from Rs 8,999 to Rs 8,24,999.

Some of these items experience price increases over time, particularly the limited-edition sneakers. In this market, Mainstreet Marketplace faces rivalry from companies like VegNonVeg, Superkicks, and a few other people that resale these goods. "As a sector, consumption is one that we are really bullish on. Investing in a business is frequently equivalent to investing in the owner of the business. In addition to being one of the most intelligent young operators we have encountered in a while, Vedant is also a buddy. Excited to travel with him," Kamath declared.