Delhi-based Mobile Beauty and Wellness platform Vyomo, has raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding by co-founder of TaxiForSure, Aprameya Radhakrishna, this investment comes within a month after his last day at TaxiForSure. Aprameya and Raghunandan G (co-founder TaxiForSure) had sold Taxiforsure to rival Ola for $200 Mn (INR 1,200 Cr.).
On his maiden investment Radhakrishna says, “The Beauty & wellness Industry is a large market, ripe for disruption. I decided to invest in Vyomo based on the extremely focused & effective core team led by Abhinav Khare and Poonam Marwah – they have built an intuitively smooth mobile platform that is way ahead of the competition. Such a high organizational maturity is quite rare for a startup of this phase”.
Founded in 2014 by Poonam Marwah and Abhinav Khare, Vyomo is a mobile marketplace for beauty and wellness. A mobile AI platform that simplifies the way beauty & wellness services are requested, offered and rendered. For beauty salons and Spa, they have SAAS based end to end salon management software that grows their business by covering everything from increased traffic, CRM, ERP, EPOS, Performance Management, Booking Management to Social Media. For end customer, they have on-the-go search, discover, book, pay and rate platform.
In simpler words, Vyomo is simplifying Beauty and Wellness Industry by providing the complete fulfillment technology stack for customers and beauty professionals and that they want to build a curated platform.
The Vyomo Mobile App for Salons, Spas and Stylists was ready in May 2015. As for their Customer App, it will be launching today.
In the first 4 weeks, Vyomo has already brought 1500 Salons and Spa on board, and have opened the platform only to 25% of the verified Salons and Spa in the first phase. As for the remaining salons, they are still under product and process training.
Cricketer Yuvraj Singh who is also an investor in Vyomo, said, “At Vyomo our aim is to create a complete end to end solution for Beauty & Wellness, a mobile platform that is lacking so far within the industry and ultimately repeat the success story of tech startups within Cab industry. Thus having Aprameya on-board is priceless”.
Abhinav Khare, Founder & CEO Vyomo added, “For us, the quality and customer experience is more important than to bringing short term traction. We are spending a fair amount of time with each of our salons on training and hand-holding for Beauty Professionals, before they start accepting bookings through Vyomo. We want our customers to receive exceptional experiences. Our team is working extremely hard to bring more than 1M stylists on the platform by 2018”.
He also added, “Having Aprameya as our investor and a member of advisory board is a great validation for our Mobile only strategy. We are looking to replicate the success of the on-demand cab industry and thus having him will only enhance our execution even further. He will be involved very closely in advising me on the Strategy, business model and leadership hiring decisions. His presence in our team, will allow us to scale and expand quickly.”
According to KPMG report, Beauty and Wellness Industry in India will be US$13 Bn by 2017. Further reports, suggests that this particular segment is growing at 15-20% YoY.
In this space, the competition is from online beauty and personal care site Purplle.com which had raised an undisclosed amount in January this year. From then it has tied up with more than 7,000 salons, spas; skin care and hair care chains. Few others who are operating in this space include Nykaa, ThebodyShop, LadyBlush, VoiletBag etc.
