Mumbai-based Hit The Mark Inc., which runs baby and kids' products portal Hopscotch.in, is in advanced talks to raise $20 million in a Series D round of funding from new and existing investors, a financial daily reported on Tuesday.
The company has received funding commitment from new investor IIFL Seed Ventures Fund, the Mint newspaper reported, citing two people aware of the development.
“Most of the existing investors, including Velos Partners, have participated in the round. Hopscotch has got some good traction and there aren’t many competitors, which helped the company raise another round,†one of the two persons above told Mint.
An email query sent to co-founder Rahul Anand confirming the development did not elicit a response at the time of filing this report.
In February 2016, the company had raised $13 million (around Rs 89 crore) in Series C funding led by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin.
The company had in 2015 secured $11 million in its Series B round of funding led by Saverin’s VC fund Velos Partners. The round also saw participation from US-based Rise Capital, Middle East-based Jabbar Internet Group, and existing investors Singapore-based Lionrock Capital and Skype co-founder Toivo Annus.
Hopscotch was founded in 2012 by Harvard Business School alumni Anand and Lisa Kennedy. Before setting up Hopscotch, Anand was the director of Diapers.com, which was acquired by Amazon in 2011. Earlier, he had worked at Skanan Ltd, Dell, Optiant and Honeywell Aerospace. An entrepreneur focused on e-commerce and digital and social media, Kennedy earlier worked at Quidsi Inc, Time Inc and Diageo. She had also worked as a financial analyst (equity research) at Goldman Sachs.
Hopscotch is an online store for baby and kids’ brands, including apparel, shoes, toys and books, and mom and maternity products.
The startup competes with FirstCry, one of the most well-funded startups in the baby care segment. In October 2016, FirstCry acquired BabyOye, the baby care business of auto conglomerate Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. It had also separately raised $34 million (Rs 226 crore) from the Mahindra Group, Switzerland-based private equity fund Adveq, Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan and existing investors including IDG Ventures India.
In January, FirstCry was in talks to acquire parenting platform mycity4kids in a deal valued under $15 million (Rs 102 crore).
Recent deals in the baby care space include The Moms Co., which raised seed funding last month from co-founder of food startup Fingerlix and beverages firm PaperBoat Shripad Nadkarni, Nestle executive Nandu Nandkishore, and senior partners from McKinsey.
In the same month, Bangalore-based parenting startup BabyOnBoard raised seed investment from Anant Pandit, founder of Gana Yantrika Systems and former president of software firm Omnesys.
In December 2016, baby care products startup Mamaearth raised seed investment led by Fireside Ventures and some HNIs.
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