Limeroad, the e-commerce platform for women, raises a $30 million series C funding round
LimeRoad is a social discovery platform for women that was started by Suchi Mukherjee, Prashant Malik and Ankush Mehra. The company has announced a series C fund raise of $30 million. Tiger Global Management, an existing investor, leads the new round with participation from existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Matrix Partners India. Previously, Limeroad raised a $15 million series B round in May, 2014. The series C round of funding takes the total amount to over $50 million (read about their series A and growth story).
"Over the last year, LimeRoad has been steadily nurturing a unique hyperactive community that takes products from thousands of sellers from across the country and shows users how to transform even the most basic white t-shirt into a style statement," says a statement from the company. Limeroad also claims that the community posted more than 1.5m style statements as “scrapbooks” last month alone, with per day postings reaching 100,000+.
LimeRoad’s machine algorithms rank order and display the highest quality scrapbooks for users to find products and styles. Suchi Mukherjee, Founder & CEO said: “We are revolutionizing the way lifestyle products are discovered and ultimately bought in India. Smaller unique sellers from across the country are getting discovered, women from across the country are using scrapbooks as a medium of style expression, and millions of users are getting access to highly affordable and unique style.” Commenting on the numbers, she adds, "We grew GMV 600% in the last 12 months, thanks to our passionate users who visited our app on average more than 38 times in the last six months. As a result 80-85% of our orders come from organic traffic.”
The company has not revealed any numbers when it comes to transactions since the focus seems to be on building up the community and engagement. Alexa puts Limeroad in the top 500 sites in India.
Roposo is another fashion discovery platform for women (which does not facilitate transactions) that recently raised a $5 million series A from Tiger Global. Roposo also has backing from Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal. Zivame is an eCommerce platform which focuses on lingerie for women and also claims to have figured out how women shop online.
For Limeroad, the investors are bullish about the engagement. Lee Fixel, Partner, Tiger Global, said: “The uniqueness of LimeRoad lies in the passionate user base and the mission of providing an engaging platform for smaller brands to thrive. We love this approach and are investing behind it and behind the team executing the strategy.” We covered Limeroad's growth story back in August 2014, stay tuned for a followup about the finer details.
Website: Limeroad