Furniture & home décor e-tailer Urban Ladder raises $50M led by Sequoia & TR Capital

Bangalore-based Urban Ladder Home Decor Solutions Pvt Ltd, which runs online furniture shop Urban Ladder, has secured $50 million in Series C round of funding led by Sequoia Capital and TR Capital. Existing investors Steadview Capital, SAIF Partners and Kalaari Capital also participated.

Urban Ladder was launched in July 2012 and offers a curated range of over 4,000 products across more than 35 categories in furniture and home décor. It was co-founded by Ashish Goel and Rajiv Srivatsa.

"Over the last three years, we have stayed sharply focused on our design thinking, product quality and customer experience. While these will continue to be important themes, geographical expansion will also be a key focus area this year. We will be present in 30 cities by the end of 2015," said Ashish Goel, CEO and co-founder, Urban Ladder.

At present, Urban Ladder delivers to 12 cities in India (Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi/NCR, Chennai, Pune, Hyderabad, Cochin Ahmedabad, Chandigarh, Surat, Kolkata and Mangalore). Last year, it said it aims to hit 25-30 cities by March 2015. Now it has extended the time period to reach this goal.

The latest funding comes just nine months after it raised $20 million in Series B round of led by Steadview Capital, with participation from SAIF Partners and Kalaari Capital. In the past, it has raised $5 million in Series A from SAIF and Kalaari and prior to that it got around $1 million from Kalaari.

Ratan Tata, chairman emeritus, Tata Group, also made a small personal investment in the company in November 2014. Although the amount was not disclosed, it is believed to be in the region of around $1 million.

It competes with the likes of Rocket Internet-incubated FabFurnish and Pepperfry.com, besides other horizontal e-commerce players such as Flipkart.com, Snapdeal.com and Amazon.in.

Among the investors, the deal deepens Sequoia's bet on vertical e-com space in India. The VC firm has backed several single vertical e-tailers and has just got an exposure to Snapdeal. The horizontal e-com marketplace has acquired FreeCharge in a deal which gives Sequoia among other VC investors of the mobile recharge company a stake in Snapdeal.

TR Capital is a Hong Kong-based mid-market PE firm targeting investments in Asia. This is its second known investment in India. Early this year TR Capital co-invested with TPG and others in eyewear e-tailer Lenskart.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)