Taxiforsure Co-founder Aprameya invests Rs 2 Cr in Mobile focused beauty and wellness startup Vyomo
After Yuvraj Singh, Taxiforsure Co-founder Aprameya Radhakrishna has invested an undisclosed amount in mobile beauty and wellness platform Vyomo. According to YourStory sources, Aprameya invested Rs 2 crore (approx) for about three per cent equity in the Dubai-based startup.
Aprameya and Raghunandan G recently sold Taxiforsure to bigger rival Ola for a neat $200 million (Rs 1,200 crore). Vyomo is Aprameya’s maiden investment. The company will use the funds for product development, hiring, and marketing.
The brainchild of London Business School classmates Abhinav Khare and Poonam Marwah, Vyomo aims to create a complete solution for beauty professionals to manage and grow their business through a smartphone.
Explaining his thesis behind the investment, Radhakrishna said, “The beauty & wellness industry is a large market, ripe for disruption. I decided to invest in Vyomo based on the extremely focused and effective core team led by Abhinav Khare and Poonam Marwah - they have built an intuitively smooth mobile platform that is way ahead of the competition. Such a high organizational maturity is quite rare for a startup of this phase.”
Earlier in April, Vyomo secured an undisclosed amount of seed funding from cricketing icon Yuvraj Singh and Qatar Investment Authority. This was the first funding by Yuvraj’s recently floated startup fund YouWeCan Ventures.
The Vyomo mobile app for salons, spas and stylists was made available in May 2015. The customer-facing app is also being launched ahead of its schedule today. Within the first four weeks, Vyomo has on-boarded 1500 salons and spa on board.
Abhinav Khare, Founder & CEO of Vyomo, added, “For us, the quality and customer experience is more important than bringing short term traction. We are spending a fair amount of time with each of our salons on training and hand-holding for beauty professionals before they start accepting bookings through Vyomo. We want our customers to receive exceptional experiences. Our team is working extremely hard to bring more than one million stylists on the platform by 2018.”
According to KPMG report, beauty and wellness industry in India will be US$13 billion by 2017 and within MENA region it was US$25.5 billion in 2014 as per the global market intelligence firm Euromonitor International.
Vyomo competes with Mumbai-based Purplle and Nykka. Both firms have raised venture capital money. While Purplle secured over $5 million in its Series A round from IvyCap Ventures, Nykka raised $3.4 million (INR 20 crores) through private investors, including HNIs and NRIs.