Women-only C2C marketplace secures funding from Rebright Partners, Tracxn Labs and Aneesh Reddy
Women fashion-centric peer-to-peer platform Elanic has raised a seed round of funding from Singapore-based Japanese venture capital firm Rebright Partners, Tracxn Labs, and Angel investor Aneesh Reddy.
The Bengaluru-based platform simplifies buying and selling of pre-owned fashion for women in India. Besides the web, Elanic features brands from well-known global and Indian labels like Ritu Kumar and Anamika Khanna.
The app enables women to sell gently used fashion items from their own closets and make easy money from items they no longer use. Elanic’s objective is to simplify every woman's singular problem -- too many clothes and nothing to wear. Takeshi Ebihara, Founding Partner of Rebright Partners, said,
We are excited to support the social economy in emerging markets and believe consumer-to-consumer commerce will be the next wave, especially for mobile-first consumers. Rebright is very bullish about India and is investing in dynamic ideas which are aimed at solving problems innovatively in the local markets.
Rebright Partners is a venture capital firm that invests in seed to early-stage internet and mobile startups in Southeast Asia and India. Aneesh Reddy is the Founder of Capillary Technologies, a leading provider of cloud-based CRM solutions.
For betting consumer-focused, mobile-first or mobile-only startups in India, Rebright recently raised $20 million fund.
The average user on Elanic has 10 products listed with a total worth Rs 15,000. While there are other peer-to-peer platforms (primarily the classifieds), they don’t address the actual needs of women's fashion. Elanic primarily solves the trust deficit attached with pre-owned fashion apparels for women.
Sellers have to click a few photos through the Elanic Android app to start selling and the rest is done by Elanic. The platform picks up the product and ensures quality check, authenticity and is sanitized before dispatching to the consumers. Palkush Rai Chawla, Co-founder, Elanic, added,
Getting over a billion people to not hoard and start selling is a large scale problem. While online classifieds work for some categories, they don’t really work for fashion. Our platform addresses needs that are specific to this category.
Sharing economy is on the rise in India, and Elanic seems to be interesting as it hardly has any serious competition in India. Of late, C2C marketplaces (like Quikr and OLX) have very little focus on women's fashion.
Unlike in the West, the concept of sharing economy is not catching up fast in India but over the past one year it gained significant traction and witnessed debuts of startups like Rentomojo, Zoomcar, Etashee, SmartMumbaikar among others.
Sensing an opportunity, marquee investors like Sequoia demonstrated faith and invested $8 million in ZoomCar while Etashee drew the attention of seed-stage angel and snapped up $800K at an idea level.