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Mumbai-based personal styling startup, Purple Style Labs, has raised about $448K (INR 3 Cr) seed funding via LetsVenture. The round was led by Augment Ventures and Rahul Kayan (Calcutta Angels Network).
Other investors who participated in this round include Nikhil Golcha (Member, Calcutta Angels Network); Operator VC; Shubham Gupta (VP – Sales, Nomura – Singapore) and Roy Kwan (Director of Sales, Deutsche Bank, Hong Kong).
Talking about the funding, Shanti Mohan CEO and co-founder of LetsVenture said, “I was impressed with Abhishek’s (Agarwal) thought process and vision. Purple Style Labs is providing a tech-enabled platform to budding fashion brands and designers and solving real pain points for them while giving consumers a wide range of wardrobe options to choose from. I wish Purple Style Labs success and am glad that LetsVenture enabled their fundraise.”
Purple Style Labs (PSL) was founded in Aug 2015 by Abhishek Agarwal, an IIT-Bombay graduate and ex-banker with Deutsche Bank. It aspires to be the biggest fashion house in India, managing multiple designer brands in the premium, luxury, as well as the affordable retail segment.
The startup will use the funding to further develop technology both on enterprise and end consumer side and increase the number of designers and stylists associated with the company.
PSL combines designing and styling on a single platform to provide unique experience to end consumers via its offline/online platform called ‘The Stylist.’ It is creating a complete ecosystem of designers, stylists, fashionistas and aspirational customers, interconnected by its omni-channel proprietary technology. It provides professional support in terms of technology, marketing, strategy, and operations. All the flagship stores of designer brands and individual stylists work on the same proprietary technology of PSL.
Since inception, PSL has integrated over 30 designers and stylists under their management across eight cities in India and has achieved 300% annual growth for the designers. PSL positions itself as a B2B2C company, so its focus right now is on building a strong foundation in terms of designer brands, sales channels and technology before it markets to end consumers.
The company has also recently on boarded senior executives, Nabeela Moinuddin (Ex-Deloitte, Vistaprint) and Nishank Gupta (Ex-Housing, Urban Clap.
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