Fans merchandising venture Bluegape raises $250K through angel funding platform LetsVenture

Bluegape LifeStyle Pvt Ltd, the company that owns and operates Bluegape.com, a fan merchandise and customisation platform, has raised Rs 1.56 crore (around $250,000) from global investors via an online funding platform LetsVenture.com. The fundraise took about two months to complete and angel investors from multiple geographies participated in the round.

Talking to Techcirclei.n Sahil Baghla, co-founder and CEO, Bluegape said the money will be used to build the technology and enhance supply chain. "We want to make this platform completely automatic so that the brands can come and make their fan merchandise stores and see the stores live in real-time. They can track sales as well. We are building technology for that," he said.

The development was first reported by The Economic Times.

Baghla shared that before listing on LetsVenture.com, Bluegape had Rs 50 lakh committed from three angel investors and after listing it received interest from angels across the world. "We finally closed the Rs 1.56 crore round which was slightly more than our target of Rs 1.5 crore," Baghla added.

In May last year, Bluegape raised an undisclosed amount in angel funding from Aniket Khera (fund manager at Wegmans Financial Services Ltd), Rahul Bhatia (portfolio manager at Willow Investment Management, LLC) and an unnamed internet entrepreneur. The firm raised less than Rs 1 crore in this angel round.

Baghla said the firm is looking to raise Rs 10-15 crore in the next round of funding which should happen in a year.

The Delhi-based startup was founded in August 2011 by Baghla, Ayush Varshney (CTO) and Akash Rastogi (operations), who were later joined by Shailendra Singh (design). All three founders are IIT-Kanpur alumni.

The startup was selected by TLabs, an accelerator programme run by Times Internet Ltd (TIL) and apart from the mentoring, it also received a Rs 10 lakh cheque from the accelerator in March last year. Baghla shared that Bluegape is clocking monthly net revenues of around Rs 30 lakh.

The funds have been raised via LetsVenture.com, an online platform that brings investors and startups on one domain. This is also the first investment round to be closed via LetsVenture, which was launched in private beta last September.

The Bangalore-based venture was set up by Shanti Mohan, Manish Singhal and Sanjay Jha in May last year. While Shanti was a business consultant for startups before starting LetsVenture, Jha was VP-product engineering at Aptean and Singhal was a business coach at Saarthi Integrated Consulting. Shanti has also worked at Hewlett-Packard (HP) as senior programme manager prior to being a business consultant. Apart from helping startups raise investment, LetsVenture allows them to get their business plans reviewed by experts as well as connect to mentors.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)