Fashion Discovery Platform Wooplr Raises $8 Mn Series B Funding From Sistema Asia Fund, Others

Bengaluru-based fashion discovery app Wooplr has raised $8 Mn in Series B round of funding from Sistema Asia fund, a proprietary fund floated by Sistema JSFC. Helion Ventures and Amereus Group also participated in this round.

Dhruv Kapoor, Managing Director – Sistema Asia Fund (SAF) Advisory said “SAF’s philosophy is to back established or emerging leaders in technology, technology-enabled and consumer brand businesses. In Wooplr, we found an emerging leader in the socially-driven commerce space with its lean marketplace model and high virality quotient.”

Founded in 2013 by Soumen Sarkar, Praveen Rajaretnam, Ankit Sabharwal, and Arjun Zacharia, Wooplr, is a fashion community and social commerce platform. It is currently led by Arjun and Ankit.

The startup will use the recent round of funding to strengthen product and technology, and to enhance its fashion discovery platform.

Wooplr raised over $140K from MakeMyTrip CEO Deep Kalra and a few others in September, 2014. In February, 2015, Wooplr raised $5 Mn from Helion Ventures.

In March 2016, it raised an undisclosed amount of funding from the co-founders of InMobi, Naveen Tewari, Abhay Singhal, and Amit Gupta; and Piyush Shah, Chief Product Officer at InMobi. The startup also counts Anand Chandrasekaran (Former Snapdeal CPO) and Raghunandan G (TaxiForSure co-founder) as investors in personal capacity.

Online fashion for women is picking up pace in India. The Indian ecommerce market is estimated to be worth $119 Bn by 2020, as per a recent Morgan Stanley report.

The penetration of smartphones and internet has offered new avenues of content consumption. Apart from the obvious platforms – Instagram, Pinterest etc., have also provided new avenues for fashion discovery.

The purchase patterns of women shoppers are increasingly becoming influencer-led. According to a company statement, Wooplr has over 200 brand partnerships, 10,000 Key Opinion Leaders and about 3 Mn women shoppers.

Recently,  fellow contender, Tiger Global-backed Roposo raised $5 Mn in Series B funding from Bertelsmann India Investments (BII) in April 2016. Other players in this segment include Voonik, Purplle,  Fabence, Klip.in etc.