Binny Bansal backed Roposo raises a $5 million series A funding round from Tiger Global
Roposo is a Gurgaon based fashion focused social network that was founded in 2013 as a branch of Giveter. Founded by IIT Delhi alumni, Mayank Bhangadia, Avinash Saxena (ex CTO of Zomato.com) and Kaushal Shubhank, Roposo.com has announced that they have raised $5 million in Series A investment led by the technology venture investor Tiger Global. Previous investors, Indian Quotient and Binny Bansal (Co-founder and COO - Flipkart.com) also participated in this round. The previous round is estimated to be at around $1 million.
Conceived as destination for fashion addicts, Roposo.com, now presents fashion choices from across 150 webstores with categories ranging from apparel, to footwear, to accessories and lingerie. All of these products are curated and recommended to each user as per their individual taste. Co-Founder Mayank Bhangadia says, “At roposo, we have created a giant online playroom with millions of fashion products, and are creating a hang-out for fashion addicts around it. We want roposo to be better than Google and Facebook for fashion searches. We are sure serious fashion seekers will make Roposo their default fashion search engine!"
"Fashion discovery is an untouched space in India and our technology team has come up with unique ways to make this search highly intuitive. With browsers spending over 200 minutes on their platform, roposo.com is probably a world leader in fashion search, and this funding will help us strengthen our product further," says Avinash.
The founders believe that brands and marketplaces are already shifting from generic social platforms like Facebook to Roposo. Fashion-focused brands like StalkBuyLove have an active profile on Roposo where they create content stories since Roposo has large fashion-seeking audience.
Roposo had a desktop version along with apps but seems to be focusing only on apps at the moment. Their Android installs are over 50,000 according to Google Play Store. Roposo is also on iOS and their website mentions that a desktop app is in the works with a new experience.
Online product discovery sites have been on the rise ever since eCommerce picked up. A lot of activity has been in the O2O (research online, buy offline space) and mainly in the devices segment. When it comes to fashion, Doozton was an online discovery platform that was nabbed by SnapDeal. Wooplr is another venture funded startup in the similar space but their focus is more on helping shoppers discover fashion products in the stores around them (O2O). For Roposo, the focus seems to be on remaining purely online and build a social network for fashion enthusiasts. With initiatives like "Become a fashion influencer", the goal clearly is to have a community of people who follow fashion and then get brands on board (as advertisers) to connect with the community.
Looking some time down the line, the dots might connect very well when you look at the various pieces- a) Flipkart's acquisition of Myntra to increase their cloud in the fashion and apparel segment b) Flipkart's co-founder investing in Roposo and c) Roposo raising a series A from Tiger Global which also happen to be investors in Flipkart.
Check out the website: Roposo.com