Venture Catalysts Back Ecommerce Fashion Portal Fynd With $500K Funding

Ecommerce-based fashion platform Fynd has secured $500K in its Series A round of funding from Venture Catalysts, a Mumbai-based Seed fund and innovation platform.

Investors including Anand Chandrasekaran, Global Director, Platform/Partnerships at Facebook, Rajiv Mehta (CEO of Arvind Sports Lifestyle Limited), and Ramakant Sharma (co-founder of Livspace) have also participated in this round.

The startup plans to deploy the raised funds to enhance consumer offerings as well as brand strategy. They also aim to leverage Venture Catalysts’ expertise and connections to increase their network, as per an official statement.

Commenting on the investment, Apoorv Ranjan Sharma, co-founder, Venture Catalysts said, “Fynd is a promising ecommerce venture which provides an innovative solution to every online shopper’s most basic problem – product delivery. The platform has performed splendidly in terms of product fulfillment and maintained seamless customer experience through unsurpassed quality and an array of brands. These factors have converted its buyers into loyal patrons.”

The company was launched in 2012 by Farooq Adam, Harsh Shah, and Sreeraman MG as Shopsense Retail Technology Pvt. Ltd, and pivoted to Fynd in November 2015. Currently based out of Mumbai, it is essentially a fashion ecommerce portal which claims to bring the latest in-store fashion online.

Harsh Shah, co-founder, Fynd said, “Early last year, we completed the preliminary testing of our business model and were scaling up our business from Mumbai to a pan-India presence. At that time we realised the need of expertise from industry majors who can actually guide us in building our product and also give us better industry exposure along with continuous feedback on our efforts.”

Fynd functions via an O2O model and directly sources products across various categories – including clothing, footwear, jewellery, and accessories, from prominent brands in the country. The startup optimises delivery time by sourcing products from the outlets nearest to the customer.

In May 2016, Fynd launched Fify– a fashion shopping “botfriend.” Fify is a conversational commerce bot for discovery and transactions. Following that, in December 2016, they launched a new feature called ‘Fynd Store’, that aimed to provide retailers an opportunity to increase sales through omnichannel user-engagement.

They had earlier raised funding from Kae Capital, Kunal Bahl, and Rohit Bansal from Snapdeal, in November 2015. Other players in the space include Voonik, Purplle, Roposo, etc.

The ecommerce space in India has been hit by massive cash crunches and valuation downfalls this year. Where Snapdeal has emerged as a fallen unicorn, with huge cost cuts and massive lay offs, its nemesis Flipkart has recently closed a massive $1 Bn funding round at a decreased valuation. It was also reported that Snapdeal’s rivals, Paytm and Flipkart, were in talks to buy Snapdeal, However, Snapdeal denied the reports.

In September 2016, Bengaluru-based online lingerie retailer Zivame pivoted to a private label business in a bid to improve its margins and thereby boost its revenues.