New Delhi-based company has raised total of $60 million so far.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: LimeRoad, a New-Delhi based social platform that allows users to curate and share collages of fashion products, announced it has garnered $30 million in funding during its series C. The latest round of funding was driven primarily by Tiger Global, with investments from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Matrix Partners India to top it off.
All three venture capital firms are returning investors that took part in LimeRoad’s $15 million series B in May 2014, and combined with the series A, brings the total raised so far to $60 million, according to TechCrunch’s records.
Since then the startup’s valuation has increased four to five times. The company has declined to disclose specific figures, but according to The Economic Times, the actual value of the goods sold on LimeRoad’s platform increased 600 percent over the past 10 months to about $40 million. The company did report that its user base simultaneously rose threefold to three million in that same time.
LimeRoad’s founders revealed they specifically had the female demographic in mind when they set out to establish and market their fashion-forward website.
“When we were starting out two years ago, everyone thought we were crazy as only 18 percent of the internet users were women,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Suchi Mukherjee.
India’s online retail market is expected to cross the $100 billion threshold by the end of the decade with fashion expected to account for 30 percent of the total share, according to research by Morgan Stanley and cited by the Times.
LimeRoad hopes to be part a driving force in the continuing ascent of Indian e-commerce, and looks to do so by differentiating itself from its competition with user-generated content. Consumers create various “looks” by combining clothing items and accessories. Customers can also engage with each other and buy items out of these “look books.” LimeRoad told the Economic Times that its users created 1.5 million looks in February, an increase of over 100 times from 10 months earlier.
“This is not just a transactional platform as the user is coming back seven times a month, which builds loyalty. Both click-through rates and conversion rates are three times higher for looks as compared to users just clicking on a single product,” said Mukherjee, who worked at eBay and Skype before launching LimeRoad in 2012.
LimeRoad’s other co-founders are former Facebook employee Prashant Malik and former Reliance Hypermarkets’ supply chain head Ankush Mehra.