Flyrobe is a fashion rental service that offers users access to premium apparel and accessories at a fraction of the retail price
(L-R) Flyrobe Co-founders Pranay Surana (COO), Shreya Mishra (CEO) and Tushar Saxena (CTO)
Flyrobe, a fashion rental platform for women in India, has raised US$5.3 million in Series A round of funding led by IDG Ventures. The round also saw participation from existing investor Sequoia India and Tokyo-based GREE Ventures, its first investment in India.
“Women spend a ton buying occasion wear which they hardly repeat. We are reimagining this US$50 billion fashion industry with a pay-per-use model,” Flyrobe Co-founder and CEO Shreya Mishra said. “With this round of funding, we will continue to scale Flyrobe and grow 4-5x by Mar 2017, triple our designer roster to 150, and launch in five more cities.”
Also Read: GREE Ventures starts looking towards India with completion of second fund’s first close
This round brings the company’s total fundraise to US$7 million in the last twelve months. Last year, Flyrobe raised US$1.7 million in seed funding led by Sequoia India.
Other investors in the company include Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, Founders of Snapdeal; Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Founder and CEO of Paytm; Kunal Shah and Sandeep Tandon, Founders of Freecharge; Zishaan Hayath, CEO of Toppr; and Leon Seynave, Chairman of Stanhope Capital.
Flyrobe was founded in September 2015 by IIT alumni Mishra, Pranay Surana and Tushar Saxena. It is a fashion rental service that offers users access to premium apparel and accessories at a fraction of the retail price.
It has a curated collection of apparel and accessories from designers, including Ritu Kumar, Masaba Gupta, Quirk Box and Outhouse, and rents it to customers. Customers use Flyrobe for occasions ranging from a weekend party to a friend’s wedding. “We want to build India’s largest virtual closet so that women can wear anything they fancy without needing to buy it,” Mishra added.
Also Read: Tailored service: This new Indonesian startup is the Uber of dress-making
Flyrobe is currently live in Mumbai and Delhi, and will be available in Bangalore and Hyderabad from next month.
The firm claims to have grown 4x in the last eight months and doubled the designers on its platform in the last two months. “We are obsessed with delivering the right customer experience – we have custom fitting for ethnic wear, three-hour deliveries in western wear for on-demand fashion needs and ensure perfect hygiene all across. We have recently also partnered with French laundry company 5asec who are experts in garment care globally,” said COO Surana.
Flyrobe counts leading Bollywood celebrities such as Parineeti Chopra, Sunny Leone and Aditi Rao Hydari as its regular users.
GREE Ventures invests in early-stage (pre-Series A and Series A) Internet and mobile companies in Japan and Southeast Asia. In May this year, GREE Ventures announced the completion of the first close of its new US$37 million fund to invest in India, apart from Southeast Asia and Japan. Since launch in 2011, it has invested in over 10 companies, including Berrybenka in Indonesia, Geniee in Japan and Healint in Singapore.
Japanese investors and corporates have been actively investing in India over the past two years. Internet and telecom giant SoftBank is the most active among them with investments in Housing, Snapdeal, Ola, Grofers and InMobi. Rebright Partners, which opened an office in India last year, besides Beenos Asia and its Founder Teruhido Sato, DeNa Co, and Mitsui have also made investments in the country.
The post Japan’s GREE Ventures enters India with participation in Flyrobe’s US$5.3M Series A appeared first on e27.