YouWeCan Ventures-backed Delhi-based Mobile Beauty and Wellness services startup Vyomo, has raised about $15 Mn (INR 100Cr) in Series A round of funding led by salon chain Naturals.
With this, Vyomo has rebranded as Naturals @Home. Naturals has taken the controlling stake in the company and Abhinav Khare, founder, Vyomo will remain the CEO. Naturals founders – Veena. K and CK Kumarvel will join the board of the company.
Akash Bhunchal who is the CTO at Vyomo will lead the formation of Technology and Engineering team that will prepare Natural @Home for the scale up.
Founded in 2014 by Poonam Marwah and Abhinav Khare, Vyomo is a mobile marketplace for beauty and wellness. A mobile AI platform that simplifies the way beauty & wellness services are requested, offered and rendered.
For beauty salons and Spa, they have SAAS based end to end salon management software that grows their business by covering everything from increased traffic, CRM, ERP, EPOS, Performance Management, Booking Management to Social Media. For end customer, they have on-the-go search, discover, book, pay and rate platform.
Naturals, is an offline salon chain spread across 80 cities in India with over 550 salons. Headquartered in Bangalore, Vyomo, currently offers services across five cities, post this funding rebrand, according to the announcement.
While Naturals will tap the online on-demand service market, Vyomo will get access to the wide no. of stylists and locations where Naturals is present.
Abhinav Khare, Vyomo CEO said, “ Currently, Naturals is spread wide across the country with over 7500 stylists in 550+ salons. This industry requires experience and Naturals with 18 years of expertise in here and having served over 3 million customers, can hugely help to make this the best beauty platform.”
According to a KPMG report, beauty and wellness industry in India will be $13 Bn by 2017 and within MENA region it was $25.5 Bn in 2014 as per the global market intelligence firm Euromonitor International. According to some industry estimates, in a large economy like India, the market size for beauty services pegs around $4.8 Bn and it is increasing rapidly.
Naturals @Home plans launch in 80 cities over the course of next six months. The industry and operational strength of Naturals will be capitalised upon for this expansion.
The first phase launch will be carried out in Chennai in May, followed by Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai. Naturals @Home is focused on building the next 5 Mn customer base, through this new vertical.
Veena. K, founder of Naturals said, “At Naturals our aim is to create the largest Beauty platform of the world having more than 3000 Salons by 2018 and cross the 10,000 salon mark by 2025. Technology lead by Abhinav will help us in putting together a complete end-to-end solution for beauty and wellness, a mobile platform that was lacking so far within the industry and ultimately repeat the success story of tech startups within cab industry.”
Prior to this in June 2015, Vyomo had raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding by co-founder of TaxiForSure, Aprameya Radhakrishna, this investment comes within a month after his last day at TaxiForSure. Earlier in April 2015, YouWeCan Ventures invested undisclosed amount in seed funding in Vyomo.
Prior to this in March 2016, On-demand beauty service provider VanityCube raised $250K in an angel round of funding led by Unicorn India Ventures. Other startups in this space include Purplle, ManageMySpa – rebranded as Zenoti, Belita, Mazkara, Stayglad and Nykaa etc.
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