Wooplr gets $8 mn in Series B round from Sistema Asia Fund, others

Wooplr Technologies Pvt. Ltd, which runs an eponymous fashion discovery platform for women, has raised $8 million (around Rs 53.6 crore) in a Series B round of funding from Sistema Asia Fund (SAF), a proprietary fund of Russian conglomerate Sistema JSFC, it said in a statement.

The round also saw participation from Singapore-based private equity firm Amereus Group and existing investor Helion Ventures.

Wooplr plans to invest the fresh capital in enhancing fashion content experience and strengthening product and technology, the firm said.

"We want to continue doing what we originally set out to achieve - making aspirational fashion easy to discover. We are happy to have Sistema and Amereus Group as part of this journey because they bring international experience and capabilities in consumer-focused technology businesses," said Arjun Zacharia, CEO of Wooplr.

The startup was founded in 2013 by four former McAfee employees–Arjun Zacharia, Praveen Rajaretnam, Soumen Sarkar and Ankit Sabharwal.

Wooplr pivoted from a hyperlocal discovery platform to a fashion community and e-commerce platform by partnering with brands and social media influencers or key opinion leaders (KLOs). The platform helps customers shop better based on location, occasion, interests and friends. It allows users to upload details of their purchases. This helps their friends to discover places and shop from there. For businesses, it provides a single-point mobile application to manage their marketing, community building and sales.

Techcircle.in exclusively reported that Wooplr received an undisclosed amount of funding from Astarc Ventures in October last year.

In March 2016, the company raised an undisclosed amount from InMobi founders Naveen Tewari, Abhay Singhal and Amit Gupta, and chief product officer Piyush Shah; TaxiForSure co-founder Raghunandan G; and former Puma India CEO Rajiv Mehta. Previously, it raised $5 million in Series A funding from Helion Ventures In February 2015.

Wooplr claims to have around 200 brand partnerships, 10,000 KOLs and three million women shoppers on the platform.

"SAF's philosophy is to back established or emerging leaders in technology, technology-enabled and consumer brand businesses. In Wooplr, we found an emerging leader in the socially driven commerce space with its lean marketplace model and high virality quotient," said Dhruv Kapoor, managing director at SAF Asia Fund Advisory.