[Funding alert] Pet-care platform Wiggles secures angel funding of $1M

Pet-care platform Wiggles has raised angel funding of $1 million from investors such as Nachikhet Deshpande, COO of L&T Infotech; Aparna Badkundri, Director, Dell Computers; Sachin Phadke, MD of Vetbiochem India; Abhay Amrute, Senior Partner, IIFL Wealth Management Ltd; Satish Billakota, VP, Europe Cognizant; Risshee Tandulwadkar, Founder, Solo Stem Cell Clinic, apart from a few other HNIs.

Founded in 2018 by father-daughter duo Anushka Iyer and Rajh V Iyer along with Venky Mahadevan, Wiggles aims to introduce transparency associated with costs, medication, nutrition, and wellness options across the pet industry.

The platform currently provides vet-on-call and grooming services across Pune and Mumbai. It also manufactures and retails healthcare and nutrition products like de-wormers, spot-on, anti-tick powder, herbal shampoos, calcium supplements, liver tonic, and other pet essentials.

The platform’s flagship offering is the Wiggles Box which contains anti-parasitic medicines, nutritional products, and essential vitamins for pets. This offering is backed by personalised alerts through the startup's app that ensure that the pet never misses a dose. Wiggles’ in-house vets create the tailormade treatments for pets and dispatch them to the pet parents.

With the fresh infusion of funds, the startup is looking to strengthen its presence, operations, distribution, expand its product range, and introduce more SKUs. While Wiggles' products are available across India via ecommerce partnerships with Amazon and Flipkart, the vet-on-call and grooming services are currently available only in Pune and Mumbai. The company is now looking to launch in Hyderabad and Udaipur.

Anushka, Founder and CEO of Wiggles, said, 

“In a short span of time, Wiggles has enabled pet parents to become stress-free by means of our Wiggles Box. We have experienced 40 percent growth month-on-month once our products and services went live in June 2019 and have seen a 4X return on costs. Having started off our operations in a single city, Pune, we have now expanded our presence to Mumbai. We will soon be present in Hyderabad and Udaipur, and are focussed on creating a brand with pan-India presence.”

(Edited by Athirupa Geetha Manichandar)

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