LimeRoad has closed $15 million in funding, which it says is one of the largest Series B rounds secured by an online commerce company in India. Investment was led by Tiger Global, with participation from returning investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Matrix Partners India.
LimeRoad, a social discovery platform targeted to female shoppers, says that it plans to use the capital to grow its site, as well as its Android app, which launched today to reach India’s nearly 100 million smartphone users.
Other major Indian sites that are focusing intently on mobile commerce include Flipkart and Snapdeal. The latter company said recently that it now gets over half of its sales from mobile-based transactions, up from just 5% nearly a year earlier. About 45% of Snapdeal’s mobile transactions come from its native applications, while the remaining 55% come through its mobile site.
In India, LimeRoad’s major competitors include Myntra, another Tiger Global investment, and Doozton, a fashion discovery site that was recently acquired by Snapdeal. As TechCrunch reported then, e-commerce in India is growing rapidly and fashion products are able to attract a premium.
In a statement, LimeRoad CEO and founder Suchi Mukherjee said, “India accounts for 20% of the world’s manufacturing of lifestyle products and we are convinced that conquering the discoverability of that wide array needs new thinking and a fresh socially architected approach. Ninety percent of our 1,500,000+ products and looks are unique and user generated, and this is growing 30% to 40% per month.”
The company’s mobile traffic is growing 45% month on month and that the new Android app, which was designed to work quickly across the wide array of smartphones used by Indian consumers, has style updates every 30 seconds, said co-founder and CTO Prashant Malik.
“LimeRoad is leading the social commerce revolution in India with a focus on winning the two biggest drivers of future online commerce marketplaces-women and mobile. The community of scrapbookers on LimeRoad is zealously passionate about the platform and reminds one of similar communities in scaled marketplaces like eBay,” said Avnish Bajaj, managing director of Matrix India.
