Voonik Technologies Pvt.Ltd, which operates a portal dealing with apparel and lifestyle accessories from multiple third party online stores, has raised $5 million (Rs 32 crore) in its Series A round of funding from Sequoia Capital and Seedfund.
Voonik will use the funds to enhance its personalisation and style recommendation technology, as per a press statement.
Founded in 2013 by Sujayath Ali and Navaneetha Krishnan, Voonik offers multiple stores on a single platform and lets consumers shop in a single checkout. Besides a web version it also offers an app where users can mix and match from styles and stock keeping units across other fashion e-tailers like Jabong, Fashionara and Zovi.
"This allows Voonik customers to get personalised recommendations from across e-stores in a single app. This is resulting in terrific user engagement, retention and growth at Voonik," said Shailendra Singh, managing director at Sequoia Capital India.
Voonik claims to have about half a million SKUs offering apparel, accessories, footwear and beauty products.
"With the ubiquitous smartphone getting cheaper, along with better connectivity, we believe mobile is the future of commerce. With this funding, we will be focusing on innovations that would enhance our mobile platform and provide an unmatched shopping experience to our users," said co-founder Ali, who is also the CEO of Voonik.
Voonik's mobile app, which was launched last year, has over one million downloads on Android. On an average it registers about 2,500 purchases daily from 1,500 unique customers, the company claims.
Tech giant Google estimates that increasing internet penetration and growing preference for online shopping is expected to help the online fashion retail market in India to touch $35 billion by 2020. It says that every third shopping search on Google is fashion related and queries in this category are growing at 66 per cent year-on-year.
The online fashion space has been seeing a lot of investor interest.
Recently, KAARYAH Lifestyle Solutions Pvt Ltd, which operates an e-commerce site selling private label women’s fashion wear besides offering its products through third party e-tailers, secured an undisclosed amount of funding from Ratan Tata, former chief of the Tata Group and currently chairman emeritus of group holding company Tata Sons.
Delhi-based Purple Panda Fashions Pvt Ltd, which runs online-first lingerie and sleepwear brand Clovia, raised an undisclosed amount in Series A funding from IvyCap Ventures.
Another fashion apparel and accessory discovery portal for third party sites is Yebhi, which had pivoted from being an e-tailer itself. However, Yebhi is more of a passive platform and users need to go to the respective e-commerce sites for completing the purchase transaction.
Voonik, in contrast, operates with its own front-end enabling direct purchases and tops it up with a free online personalised stylist who suggests users (if they wish to know) if a particular product would suit their body type of complexion.
