Eyewear brand Lenskart on Thursday said it has led a $2 million (around Rs 15.4 crore) investment in a pre-Series A round in location intelligence platform, GeoIQ.
The round also saw participation from existing investors like 9 Unicorns, Venture Catalysts and Ecosystem Ventures.
Bengaluru-based GeoIQ, operated by Quantduo Technologies Pvt. Ltd, plans to use the fresh money to expand its global footprint, strengthen proprietary data and leverage data scientists to build diverse artificial intelligence (AI) models.
“With GeoIQ’s technology, Lenskart will be opening more omni-channel stores globally with 50% better return on invested capital and 5 times the speed of a normal opening. Through this funding, we also want to help facilitate GeoIQ’s ambition of becoming a world class geo-analytics company in the long run,” said Peyush Bansal, Co-Founder and CEO of Lenskart.
Founded in 2010, Lenskart is said to be Asia’s largest omni-channel retailer and manufacturer of premium contemporary eyewear that turned unicorn in December 2019 after raising $275 million from SoftBank Vision Fund.
A unicorn is a startup with a valuation of at least $1 billion.
The brand claims to serve over 10 million customers across 235 Indian cities and Singapore and has now entered the Middle East and US markets.
This is Lenkart’s second investment this week after the company invested $100 million in Singapore-based eyewear platform, Neso Brands on 16 May.
Founded in 2018 by Devashish Fuloria, Tusheet Srivastava, and Ankita Thakur, Geo IQ leverages its location data stack and machine-learning capabilities to provide companies with insights on their customers.
“The use of analytics has become widespread as more and more businesses are recognizing the benefits of data. AI-based intelligence has evolved rapidly and is currently in a hyper-adoption stage. The funds raised will enable us to add new features to our product and empower our customers,” said Devashish Fuloria, CEO at GeoIQ.
In November 2020, GeoIQ raised Rs 2.5 crore (about $337,940) in a seed round of funding.