Inc42 Daily Brief
Stay Ahead With Daily News & Analysis on India’s Tech & Startup Economy
Mumbai-based fashion ecommerce app Hippily has raised $250K in seed round of funding from a group of high-profile angel investors across India, USA, and Singapore, including Dr. Sridhar Ramaswamy (Sr VP, Ads & Commerce at Google), and Rakesh Mathur (Founder of Junglee).
Hippily was founded in 2013 by Dr. Viswanath Ramachandran and Prajakt Deolasee., It offers curated trendy fashion products, looks, and collections, especially for women to discover, shop and share from a wide variety of online stores. It also uses software algorithms and inputs from social media to personalise the shopping experience for women. The company has tie-ups with fashion stylists to curate products. Its stores’ section has over 30 stores which are tied up as partners with Hippily.
Dr. Ramachandran, founder and CEO of Hippily said, “The philosophy behind Hippily is to de-addict the fashion ecosystem from discounts by providing the user a personalised feed that learns from dozens of data points and gets better DAILY. We’re seeing intense engagement and repeat purchases from a core audience, and over 50% of our orders are for undiscounted products, proving the robustness of our approach. We’re now increasing our investment in the personalization engine by hiring a dedicated Machine Learning & Data Sciences team with a world class academic advising us”.
According to Yahoo-owned mobile analytics company Flurry, the mobile shopping behavior nearly tripled last year. Seeing this surge, brands are looking for ways to engage potential buyers outside of their own mobile apps and websites. Twitter has recently added a “buy” button to allow users to make purchases via the social network. While, Facebook, and Pinterest are also reportedly launching similar buttons.
Hippily competes with a number of fashion apps such as Wooplr, Roposo, Voonik, and others in India.
Note: We at Inc42 take our ethics very seriously. More information about it can be found here.