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The Wedding Brigade, a Mumbai based online wedding planner portal, has raised $600K (INR 4 crore) in Pre-Series A round of funding from Blume Ventures and four undisclosed angels. The funds will be used to enhance product & services offerings, growth activities and acquire talent.
The portal was launched in November 2014 as Indear.com by Sanna Vohra. It aims to be a one stop destination for to discover, plan and shop for Indian weddings. The portal lets users purchase wedding apparel, jewellery, gifts, and other essentials.
As per Sanna, it is a technology-centric portal which can make intelligent recommendations based on user’s role in the wedding, or the type of function they are attending. It also facilitates venue and service bookings, such as makeup artists, mehendi artists, or it’s free concierge service online.
“This round of funding gives us the necessary resources to scale our model at an accelerated pace. With our new brand identity, we are poised to make deep in-roads into our country’s high-growth wedding market.”
The wedding market in India is highly unorganised. With 100 lakh weddings that happen in India annually, wedding industry is currently growing at a rate of 25%. According to Sajid Fazalbhoy, Principal at Blume Ventures, the second largest expense for an Indian family post purchase of a home is their children’s weddings. “This enormous market opportunity is currently served by a few small fragmented players.”
The platform has been launched for users in Mumbai and Delhi, and will soon expand to other cities such as Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Chennai. It will also introduce new categories such as photographers, caterers and more.
Other similar portals in this space include WeddingPlz, Eventosaur, MarketForShaadi.com, Eventila, FullOnShaadi.com, and more.
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