[Funding alert] Eyewear unicorn Lenskart subsidiary Neso Brands raises over $100M in seed round

Neso Brands, a subsidiary of omnichannel eyewear retailer Lenskart, has raised more than a $100 million in seed round from investors including KKR, SoftBank, Alpha Wave Global, and Temasek. 

In an official release, Neso Brands said it will partner and invest in consumer eyewear brands around the world and grow these brands by leveraging synergies across the Lenskart Group to accelerate international expansion.

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Peyush Bansal, CEO of Lenskart, said, 

“With this investment in Neso Brands, we want to accelerate our mission of transforming the way people see and experience the world. Consumers want better and better every day and while people's quality of life has been uplifted through all other lifestyle products such as shoes, apparel and wearables, eyewear products are the same old with no innovation, just more expensive. It is our firm belief that the eyewear brands of today will not be brands of the future. And Neso is our initiative to partner with founders globally to help create eyewear brands of the future.”

Neso Brands also announced that Bjorn Bergstrom joined the founding team as CEO. He has vast experience from consumer scale-ups, venture capital, and management consulting. 

Bergstrom is an experienced investor and DTC operator, having most recently served as Chief Growth Officer and interim Chief Product and Technology Officer for the global fashion brand NA-KD. Based out of Sweden and launched in 2016, NA-KD expanded to more than 100 markets and reached net sales of over $200 million in just five years.

“Today there is a perfect storm in the eyewear industry that makes it ripe for disruption. Consumers have increasingly high demands when it comes to customer experience, branding, and choice, but incumbent players have been unable to keep up. By investing in the most promising new brands in the industry and leveraging centralised resources across technology, manufacturing and distribution, Neso Brands will be uniquely positioned to scale the eyewear brands of the future,” added Bjorn Bergstrom.

Neso Brands is a Singapore-based global eyewear company founded in 2022 to enable the direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands across the world to become brands of the future. With general ecommerce adoption skyrocketing and technologies such as AR and AI becoming more mature, the time has come for nimble eyewear brands to capitalise on these trends and capture market share. Neso Brands will house these brands and enable a quicker global roll-out by giving the brands access to shared resources particularly technology, supply chain, distribution, capital and best practices. 

IPO-bound Lenskart, one of the earliest unicorns in the D2C space, recently raised $100 million from Alpha Wave Capital and was last valued at $4.3 billion. It serves over 10 million customers with a presence in 235 Indian cities and Singapore across a network of 1000+ omnichannel stores, and has now entered the Middle East and US markets.