Mumbai-based Smursh Media Pvt Ltd, which runs the social shopping discovery and curation platform Klip.in, has raised $0.5 million (Rs 3.1 crore) in a pre-Series A round of funding from Calcutta Angels, existing investors VentureNursery Angels and Mumbai Angels, along with a few other individual investors.
The investment will be used to scale up technology and marketing teams.
Klip was set up in 2011 by Harsh Gadia and Maneesh Madambath. While Gadia has done his higher studies from SP Jain Institute of Management & Research, Madambath has studied management and finance from University of Mumbai.
Klip helps users discover products across the web by aggregating and curating them based on social connections and interest graphs. On this platform, users can do relevant product research with help from their social connections, ask questions and post comments about products. It claims to have over 1.2 million products added to over 40,000 Klip-boards.
It currently has over 1,100 e-commerce stores in its platform and says nearly 80 per cent of its users are women and fall in the age group of 18-28 years.
Raghav Kanoria, co-founder and director, Calcutta Angels Network led the investment along with Harsh Modi, management committee member of the network.
We see tremendous scope in social commerce and believe Klip’s focus on its community is the key to a successful business in this space,†said Kanoria.
“With our new investment partners we are now in a position to add scale to the validation Klip saw over the last year,†added Gadia.
“Klip shows that the best approach to social commerce is to build a strong community of users and we are excited to see this next phase of their evolution,†said Ravi Kiran, co-founder, VentureNursery.
Klip had raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Mumbai Angels and a few individual investors, including Anirudh Damani, executive director, K Damani Group; Arihant Patni, MD at Hive Technologies; and Jeffrey Keng Yew Lai, director, New Zealand-based Emje Investments, in September 2013.
It also roped Sarvjeet Ahuja, former co-founder of social shopping startup Wanelo as its technology advisor, early last year.
(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)
