Excl: Delhi-based Start-up BigIndianWedding.com Raises Funds, To Launch E-com Section

One year old start-up that launched a wedding planning services portal BigIndianWedding, has raised an undisclosed amount from a privately held Indian business family.

Founder and chief executive officer of BigIndianWedding, Ashish Abrol told Techcircle that the firm will use the funds to launch an e-commerce section as an extension of its existing business domain. He did not disclose the exact quantum of money raised but said it is less than $5 million(Rs 27 crore).

Abrol said, "The ecommerce page will go live latest by Monday. And a button called 'wedding shop' will be added in the existing portal. The money will be used mainly to build supply chain, ERP, backend and strong relationship with the customers."

As of now the site works as an information search engine for wedding related services such as price quotes from banquet halls among others. While it would continue with that business, it would start selling products after procuring from vendors and maintaining its own warehouse for products such as wedding lehengas and jewellery.

We had written about the firm here when it saw early traction in customer traffic. At that time Abrol had said the firm is looking to raise around Rs 5-8 crore initially, so we would guess the current round of funding would be in that region.

BigIndianWedding which has its operation in 11 cities right now, (Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Chandigarh and Ludhiana), plans to expand to four more cities by the end of April. The wedding planning portal also intends to increase its listed vendor base from the existing 6,000, to 10,000 in the next three months.

Abrol claimed that the traffic to the site has increased by 20 per cent month-on-month since its launch and revenue increased by 50-70 percent month-on-month. The site recorded 2.2 million unique visitors last month.

The company is also hiring more people in the sales team as it looks to increase revenue. The mother site BigIndianWedding started with 15 advertisers and now it has some 180. Once the sales team become stronger, the aim is to add around 40 advertisers a month.

Abrol said the latest round of funding is going to last for 12 months and the firm might go for another round of fundraising by end of this year