New Delhi: Wooplr Technologies Pvt. Ltd, which owns and operates fashion discovery app Wooplr, on Monday said it has raised an undisclosed amount from Naveen Tewari, Abhay Singhal and Amit Gupta, all co-founders of mobile ad-tech firm InMobi.
Piyush Shah, chief product officer of InMobi, Raghunandan G., co-founder of TaxiForSure (which was acquired by Ola in 2015) and former Puma India chief executive officer Rajiv Mehta also participated in this round.
Bengaluru-based Wooplr raised $5 million from Helion Venture Partners a year ago.
The new funds will be utilized for geographical expansion. Currently, the company has one office in Bengaluru and plans to set up offices in Delhi and Mumbai shortly.
“I believe Wooplr is a unique product in the Indian market that has solved the fashion discovery problem for consumers and brands. This makes me confident that Wooplr has the capability to change the current paradigm in online commerce,” said Tewari, founder and chief executive officer of InMobi.
The company was founded by four former McAfee employees—Arjun Zacharia, Praveen Rajaretnam, Soumen Sarkar and Ankit Sabharwal—in March 2013. While Zacharia studied engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Karnataka, Rajaretnam has a BE in electronics and communications degree from the Anna University. Sarkar studied at the Indian Institute of Management, Indore, while Sabharwal has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the Jaypee University of Information Technology.
The start-up offers a fashion community and social commerce platform. It allows users to view a personalized feed of curated fashion products and looks. They can also follow fashion influencers on the platform for style inspiration.
According to Mehta, Wooplr has the potential to take fashion commerce industry away from the discount- and sale-driven model to focusing on balancing commerce, content and community.
The company targets to have 100 million women on its platform by 2020. It currently has 2 million.
“We already have 2 million women on the platform, 20,000 transactions a month, and the average bill size is Rs.1,200, almost double that of horizontal e-commerce players. Together as a team, we will continue our growth trajectory and hit $100 million gross merchandise value by 2018,” said Zacharia, chief executive officer, Wooplr.
[“source-Livemint”]