[Funding alert] Video-based social commerce platform Eloelo raises $450K in seed round led by Waterbridge

Bengaluru-based beauty, health and wellness social commerce platform Eloelo announced that it has closed a seed round of $450,000 funding led by Waterbridge Ventures. Other angel investors who participated in the round include AppyHigh Group, Ramakant Sharma (CEO-Livspace), Rishi Vasudev (CEO-Lifestyle, ex-SVP at Flipkart), TS Raghavendra (ex-Qikwell), Shuchin Bajaj (Founder and Director of Ujala Cygnus Hospitals), Apaksh Gupta (CEO-OneImpression), and Vasant Rao (ex-AutoNinja).

Launched just two weeks back, the Eloelo app offers curated 60-second videos by top influencers, combined with expert answers and gamified shopping rewards. The platform claims to be the lifestyle destination for the Bharat millennial user.

The fresh round of funding will be used for building the core team across tech and non-tech roles, working on new product initiatives and user acquisition.

Speaking about the development, Saurabh Pandey, Co-founder and CEO, Eloelo , said,

"Eloelo’s vision is to empower the Bharat millennial user to look good, feel good daily with a platform that blends content-community-commerce for beauty, health and lifestyle. Our core belief is that short-video content blended with a community that acts as a safe space is the future for a category like beauty and health where the user seeks bite-sized information like tips, product reviews, etc before making a commerce decision."

According to company statement, it saw an overwhelming organic traction within 15 days of app launch with 20,000 users (over 80 percent from non-metro cities) downloading the app and nearly 700,000 actions on the platform right from watching videos to posting questions to claiming elo-coins.

Commenting on the investment,  Ravi Kaushik, Partner, Waterbridge said, "We invested in Eloelo as part of our dedicated funding programme Fast Forward which we ran at the peak of the pandemic. The founders are deeply entrenched in what we call as Social Commerce 2.0 and are marrying content, community and commerce in the health, wellness and beauty verticals. We believe this is a deep vertical where both content and community can be tailor-made to solve discovery and distribution for multiple brands while creating a platform for users to drive commerce through trust, product discovery, short format content, tips and recommendations."

With the current funding round the startup's valuation stands at $2 million.