After two tranches, Fynd finally closes Series A at $3.4M

Fashion commerce portal Fynd on Wednesday announced that it has raised $3.4 million in a Series A round led by IIFL Seed Ventures. The funding also saw participation by Kae Capital, FJ Labs, Singularity Ventures, GrowX, Traxcn Labs and Hong Kong-based Axis Capital.

Fynd had earlier raised $500K from Venture Catalysts in March and $500K from Silicon Valley-based Rocketship in May.

The funds will be used to accelerate growth by enhancing its consumer base; strengthen the technology backbone, while optimising operations including marketing strategies, the offline-to-online (O2O) fashion commerce platform said in a media release.

Prior to this round, the company had raised an undisclosed amount from Snapdeal’s former CPO Anand Chandrasekaran, Rajiv Mehta, CEO of Arvind Sports Lifestyle, and Ramakant Sharma, ex-VP Engineering, Myntra and Co-Founder of Livspace.

Fynd, which deals in clothing, footwear, jewellery and accessories, sources products from various prominent brands across the country (via their in-store inventory) and brings them online. This allows Fynd to deliver to its online customer the latest products available in the brand stores.

Fynd’s in-store product Fynd Store helps store managers to place an order on behalf of walk-in customers in case the desired product is not available in their store, which is then delivered directly to the customer’s address.

At present, more than 8,000 physical outlets across the country have proprietary integrations with the O2O platform.

Speaking of the latest round of funding, Fynd Co-founder Harsh Shah says,

“Fynd is growing steadily and has managed to seal some exciting partnerships in the past few months. Thanks to its unique business model it has also managed to win tremendous investor confidence. We want to revolutionise the online and offline shopping experience across all channels and customer touch-points to reach out to more customers in the coming months. The capital raised in our Series A round of funding will help us further bolster our growth trajectory and enhance our tech capabilities.”

 Investor Speak

According to Purvi Parkeria, Senior VP, IIFL Seed Ventures, “Fynd is going through an exciting phase; it is leading the way for O2O (offline to online) commerce in India and it is the right time for Fynd to accelerate its growth strategy by reaching out to larger number of end consumers as well as enterprise clients.”

While citing their reason to invest, Vidushi Kamani, Venture Partner, Kae Capital stated,

“The Fynd team has consistently demonstrated their ability to listen to the market and build scalable products. From their B2B days to their current model, Fynd has shown impressive growth and is looking to capture a big opportunity in the O2O (offline to online) Fashion segment. Building a successful commercial operation with a strong technology backbone is what differentiates this company and sets it up for the next level of growth.”

Starting in 2012, Fynd began life as Shopsense Retail Technology, which was essentially a B2B retail and inventory management solution. In February last year, the company pivoted to a B2C e-commerce marketplace.

Sector at a glance

Just last month, Fynd had stated that it had close to 3.5 million styles live on its app as well as website, and was looking to push out another 3.5 million in the near future.    

While speaking to YourStory last year, Harsh had said that the firm made money by charging a commission of 20 per cent from brands for every transaction made or product sold.

According to Fashion Forward 2020, a joint report by Boston Consulting Group and Facebook, at present close to $7-9 billion of the $70-billion Indian fashion market is digitally influenced. It also says that online fashion purchase market is expected to be worth $12-14 billion by 2020.

Besides e-commerce giants Flipkart and Amazon, which are betting big on the fashion space, corporate giants like Future Group, Reliance Industries, and Tata Sons have also entered the online fashion space with ABOF, Ajio, and Tata CLiQ, respectively.

YourStory reported this month that Amazon hosts 15,000 brands and over two million products. In 2016, Amazon Fashion inked deals with over 150 top fashion brands, including Aeropostale, Emporio Armani, Armani Exchange and Versus by Versace.

This year, the company has bagged exclusive partnerships with US brands GAP and Under Armour, among others.

 Website- Fynd