Online-to-offline app Fashalot gets seed funding from YourNest, others

Innotarget Fashalot Retails Pvt Ltd, which runs location-based fashion and store discovery mobile platform, Fashalot, has raised an undisclosed amount of funds in its pre-Series A funding round, led by YourNest Angel Fund and angel investor Rajul Garg.

The new capital will be invested in product development, talent acquisition and business development, it said in a statement.

"The platform is playing a vital role in enhancing the revenue of brick-and-mortar retailers in India by providing them an omni-channel extension to their core business," said Garg. An angel investor, Garg is a director of Sunstone Business School and had earlier co-founded GlobalLogic which he sold to Apax Partners in 2013.

Customers can discover fashion products of their choice at stores and prices in their vicinity via the Fashalot app while offline retailers are able to attract shoppers who may not otherwise step into their stores. The online-to-offline app is currently operational in Delhi-NCR and Bangalore, and the startup aims to enter more cities by the end of this year.

In the online fashion segment, hyperlocal fashion commerce portal Yufta raised an undisclosed amount of money in pre-Series A round of funding from Ajay Data of Data Infosys Ltd, and a group of Mumbai and Dubai-based high net-worth individuals (HNIs) this month. Mumbai-based Hippily Technology Pvt Ltd, operator of the Hippily shopping personalisation app for women, raised $250,000 in seed funding last week. In March, 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.

Fashalot was co-founded by Koshal, Rishi Batra, and Amit Sharma in April 2015. While Koshal has earlier worked with Intuit, Balaji Telefilms and Myspace, Batra has worked with Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd, and Copal Partners. Sharma has previously worked with Intuit, Oracle, and Hewlett-Packard.

"Several regional, national and international brands that have partnered with us owe almost 10 per cent of their monthly revenue to our disruptive mobile technology," said Amit Koshal, founder and CEO, Fashalot.

Fashalot claims that 30 per cent of the app's users are repeat customers.