Helion Venture Partners Invests In Baby Products E-tailer Hoopos.Com

Mother care, baby care and kids' products e-tailing start-up hoopos.com has raised an undisclosed sum from early-stage venture capital firm Helion Ventures Partners, according to a company statement.

The proceeds will be used for ramping up the team, upgrading technology, developing fulfilment infrastructure including warehouse and logistics, marketing and building customer support infrastructure, it said.

Bangalore-based hoopos.com offers products across 12 categories such as baby essentials, clothes, toys, travel, books and nursery furniture, among others. It was started in September this year by a four-member team, with experience across baby products retail, e-commerce and Web technologies.

The team includes Vijay Jumani, Radhika Jumani, Raveen Sastry (co-founder and former VP, business development, of Myntra.com) and Anubhav Sudha (earlier, he was a part of the start-up team at Tavant Technologies). Incidentally, the Jumanis are also the co-founders of Inventis Retail that runs baby product store chain 'appleofmyi' in Bangalore.

"The mother care and baby products market is marked by long-stay consumers who place heavy trust on retailers offering wide choice, detailed product information and reliability. Online, as a medium, allows us to exploit the variety of products and product categories to which we have access while providing the comfort of shopping from home," said Vijay Jumani, co-founder and CEO of hoopos.com.

"By the end of March 2012, we are looking at clocking a turnover of around Rs 1.5 crore and hitting the target of 5,000 transactions per month," he added.

"Mother care and baby products as a category has huge potential for online retail. While the demand for this category is growing exponentially, there are few reliable options that offer a vast range for online shoppers," Ashish Gupta, senior managing director of Helion Advisors, commented on the investment. Gupta will join the board of Hoopos.

The other players operating in this space include babyoye.com, hushbabies.com and firstcry.com besides various horizontal e-commerce firms who also offer baby care products.

This latest transaction marks the third such funding deal in the specialised online retail domain this year. Pune-based BrainBees Solutions Pvt Ltd, which runs the online baby products shop Firstcry.com, had raised $4 million from private equity firm SAIF Partners in its first institutional round of funding. This followed soon after babyoye.com, another online retailer of baby products, raised $2.5 million from Accel Partners and Tiger Global.

Helion is a multi-stage, India-focused venture fund managing $350 million. This year, it has invested in firms such as Eye-Q Vision (healthcare), Webaroo Technology (Internet software & services) and Vienova Education besides two other Internet retail firms – Exclusively.in and – as per VCCedge, the financial research platform of VCCircle.

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