The Boom In Fashion Segment, Gives Social Commerce Startup, LimeRoad Way To Grasp $30 Mn

According to a research by Morgan Stanley, India’s online retail market is expected to cross $100 Bn mark by 2020 with fashion expected to account for about 30% of the total market. With the top ecommerce marketplaces heavily betting in this space, including Amazon and Flipkart, number of players in the fashion space with a slightly different approach have also been able to grasp the investor attention in the past few months.

One such startup is LimeRoad which has just announced that it has raised over $30 Mn in a funding round led by Tiger Global and its existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Matrix Partners. For Gurgaon-based LimeRoad, a social shopping platform focussed on fashion, this Series C round of funding comes in 10 months after it had raised $15 Mn in Series B from the investors mentioned above.

The Concept

Modelled on the popular community-powered social commerce platform Polyvore in the US, LimeRoad, a social commerce platform, provides lifestyle products across categories like apparel, accessories, among others. The website allows shoppers to buy according to material, brand, color etc. and unlike the old guard of online retail, it facilitates discussions on products, purchases and their promotions through the viral route and the main thrust of the business relies on user-generated content, which separates it from other platforms like Myntra or Jabong.

Besides fashion and apparel, LimeRoad also offers home and kitchen products. (non-perishable)

The Numbers

• The startup, currently, is clocking INR 100 Cr. run rate, “We grew our GMV by 600% in the past year, with 80-85% of our orders coming from organic traffic,” Suchi, founder of LimeRoad said.
• Its user base has risen three times to 3 Mn in last 10 months.
• Its users created over 1.5 Mn looks in February, an increase of over 100 times from 10 months earlier.
• Currently, about 60% of LimeRoad’s transactions come through the mobile with projections of it touching 80% shortly.

“Mobile social commerce is highly disruptive and is the driver of future ecommerce growth in a mobile-only market like India. As for the business, LimeRoad is a pure marketplace model with deep integration into the vendors and is, therefore, highly scalable on the vendor side,” said Avnish Bajaj, managing partner of Matrix Partners India.

Lee Fixel, Partner at Tiger Global, said the uniqueness of LimeRoad lies in the user base and the mission of providing an engaging platform for smaller brands to thrive.

Gurgaon-based A.M. Marketplaces Pvt Ltd, the company behind LimeRoad was founded by Suchi Mukherjee, who has previously worked with the eBay, Skype and Gumtree, along with Prashant Malik, an early Facebook employee, and Ankush Mehra, former head of supply chain at Reliance Hypermarkets.

With this round, the total funds raised by three year old LimeRoad has reached $50 Mn. The funds raised in this round will be infused in scaling up the and build on hyper personalizing the platform.

Latest In The Fashion Segment

Just last week, Gurgaon-based fashion discovery site, Roposo.com had  raised $5 Mn (over INR 31 Cr) in its series A round of funding from Tiger Global Management, Indian Quotient and Binny Bansal (co-founder and COO of Flipkart.com). In January, Hyderabad-based online fashion social network, VioletStreet.com had raised INR 2 Cr. in an angel round.

Snapdeal had acquired online fashion retailer Exclusively.com to strengthen its fashion business last month, Snapdeal had also acquired fashion discovery site Doozton last year and even Aditya Birla Group had also disclosed its plans to launch an online fashion retail venture.

Startups including Voonik, Klip, Wooplr are also in the social commerce space.