[Funding alert] Footwear brand Rapawalk raises $300K from Inflection Point Ventures

Rapawalk, a Bengaluru-based online footwear brand that offers a personalised service to its customers, has raised $300,000 in a seed funding round led by angel investment platform Inflection Point Ventures (IPV).

The startup said the funds raised in this round will be focused towards scaling up its business. Rapawalk plans to continue expanding its online business for the coming 12-15 months and also offer an omnichannel shopping experience to its customers.

''Rapawalk, being in the D2C segment, offers a great personalised footwear design and shopping experience while managing the entire customer journey. Their light inventory business model and continued growth path on online platforms stands Rapawalk in good stead to reach further heights,” said Vinay Bansal, Founder and CEO, IPV.

Started in 2018, IPV has invested more than Rs 100 crore across 40+ startups.

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The digital footwear brand, founded in 2018 by IIM-Ahmedabad alumni Kashif Mohammad and Aravind Maddireddy, counts marquee investors like Raveen Sastry, Co-founder Myntra; Sanjay Ramakrishnan, former Marketing Chief, Myntra; and Ravi Garikipati, former CTO, Flipkart, among others.

Kashif Mohammad, Co-founder and CEO, Rapawalk said, 

“Personalisation is the future of Fashion. We want to give ultimate power to every customer to create their own footwear, thereby giving them immersive shopping experience. Footwear shopping always had inherent challenge related to fitting, we at Rapawalk are driven by the vision to make footwear for all foot shape and sizes.”

Since its inception, the company claims to have recorded a 15X growth in sales volume in the last financial year, with a 40 percent cumulative monthly growth rate.

According to the startup, footwear in India is currently a $6 billion+ market growing at a fast 14.5 percent on a yearly basis. Branded footwear is only 45 percent of the market and is outpacing the unbranded footwear at a 19 percent YoY growth. Online penetration of the footwear sales stands at a small 11 percent, but experiencing an accelerated growth of 27 percent YoY.