Fashion curation app for women Hippily raises $250K in seed funding

Mumbai-based Hippily Technology Pvt Ltd, operator of the Hippily shopping personalisation app for women, said on Wednesday it has raised $250,000 (Rs 1.66 crore) in seed funding.

Rakesh Mathur, co-founder of the Amazon-acquired price comparison platform Junglee, and Sridhar Ramasamy, senior vice president of ads and commerce vertical at Google, invested in this round. Manish Mahajan, CEO at Singapore-based investment firm Mount Nathan Advisors, also took part in the round.

Hippily will use the funds to improve its personalisation engine and building a machine learning and data sciences team, the company said in a statement.

"The robustness of their platform is market leading. Overlay this with the vast but razor sharp creative canvas of their curation methodology and you've got a product that can provide Indian women with their own unique fashion," said Mahajan.

Launched in June 2014 by Viswanath Ramachandran and Prajakt Deolasee, Hippily is an app-only discovery and shopping platform which offers a daily curation of trendy fashion products, looks and collections for women. While the platform curates fashion products from about 100 stores, purchases can be made from the curated list of 30 partner stores on the platform. The startup hopes to bring this number to 200 by the end of this year. Prior to January, Hippily was only a fashion discovery platform.

"The philosophy behind Hippily is to de-addict the fashion ecosystem from discounts by providing a personalised feed that learns from dozens of data points and gets better daily. Over 50 per cent of our orders are for non-discounted products," said Ramachandran, CEO at Hippily.

An IIT-Bombay alumnus, Ramachandran earlier worked at cloud messaging platform Gupshup as chief operating officer. Deolasee, chief technology officer at the venture, worked together with Ramachandran at Gupshup.

Hippily earns a commission on products sold from its partner stores. The startup is looking at advertisements as a possible source of future revenue stream. It is also considering adding curated fashion products for men as part of its future plans.

The fashion curation and discovery segment has received investor attention in recent times, and quite a few startups have raised funding.

Last month, personalised fashion app WithMe raised $250,000 in angel funding from a group of investors comprising Alex Kuruvilla, managing director at CondeNast India; Pradeep Guha, former head of Zee Group and BCCL; Saket Dhankar, head of Lakme Fashion Week; and serial entrepreneur and investor Rajan Pandhare.

Earlier in March, Zappka, a mobile platform that allows users to discover, review and share apps, raised $100,000 in angel funding from Planet GoGo founders Daman Soni and Rajat Gupta, besides a bunch of affluent individuals it didn't name.

In a similar space, Wooplr Technologies Pvt Ltd, which runs a platform that enables hyperlocal discovery of products and commerce, received an undisclosed amount of funding from InMobi and TaxiForSure founders this month. Gurgaon-based Relevant e-solutions Pvt Ltd, which runs fashion-focused social network Roposo.com, raised $15 million from existing investor Tiger Global Management in August last year. Delhi-based Styledotme Fashion and Lifestyle Pvt Ltd, which operates mobile fashion app Styledotme, has secured funding from the Indian Angel Network.