Joolz, a Mumbai-based jewellery community and the marketplace has raised $493K (INR 3.3 Cr) in a Pre-Series A round of funding from Ah! Ventures and others.
This current seed round was also led by Mahesh Ahuja – CEO, Brittman India, Sri Peddu – MD, Powerhouse Ventures, M&S Partners, Deepak Kasthwal – ex- CFO, OLA Cabs, PKX Thomas – ex Technology Head, Cleartrip, Neha Shah and angel round by GSF Accelerator.
Jools was founded in May 2015 by Arnaud Lorie and Eli Atlas. In November, however, Atlas left Joolz to pursue other opportunities.
Joolz is a virtual mobile jewellery store, gathering top brands on an intuitive and interactive application. It is not only a sales platform; it is a community that breeds interaction, discussion, and feedback analysis. Leveraging a network of partnerships with top Indian jewellers, Joolz aggregates and curates inventory to offer consumers a rewarding online shopping experience.
Joolz has about 35 jewellers, a mix of online and offline retailers, and has so far largely focussed on small-ticket jewellery items ranging from INR 10,000-25,000. It has an average selling ticket size of about INR 25,000. It has even managed to clock sales that have ranged up to INR 3 Lakhs.
The startup will use the funding to boost operations, products, marketing, and further building up its team.
Talking about Joolz, founder Arnaud Lorie said, “Buying jewellery is so closely intertwined with Indian culture that the act of simply selling it online is not going to create any significant impact in the market. We, therefore, want to be the single biggest facilitator of jewellery commerce, whether online or more importantly, offline.”
As per Lourie the offline/traditional Indian jewellery market is estimated to be at $40 Bn while the online jewellery market, which is still nascent, is currently valued at about $200 Mn by a number of industry reports.
Joolz was also a part of the GSF’s mobile accelerator programme in 2015. Prior to this in July 2016, Bangalore-based online jewellery startup, Bluestone, raised about $30 Mn (INR 200 Cr) in Series D round of funding. IIFL, Accel Partners along with Kalaari Capital, RB Investments and IvyCap Ventures participated in this round. Other startups in this segment include CaratLane, VelvetCase, among others.
