Fashion e-commerce portal Fynd raises US$500,000

Fynd, the fashion e-commerce portal has raised US$500,000 from Silicon Valley-based Rocketship. This capital has been raised in an extension of the Series A funding round where it had raised US$500,000 from Venture Catalysts.

Rocketship is an early-stage venture capital fund launched by Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman. They previously co-founded Kosmix, a social search and data startup. The VC fund invests in companies leveraging their data science enabled models.

Other than funding, Fynd will also benefit from Rocketship’s expertise in data mining and machine learning capabilities to better capture the fashion e-commerce space. Fynd was initially started as Shopsense Retail Technology Pvt. Ltd. in 2012. Fynd was conceptualized and started in 2015. It will utilize the funds raised in these rounds to optimize its overall operations, strengthen its technological capabilities, and improve its customer targeting with enhanced offerings.

Fynd has garnered the support of some influential and experience names in the VC space and also among the Indian startup fraternity. It is backed by Kae Capital and angel investors Anand Chandrasekaran, Rajiv Mehta, and Ramakant Sharma.

The online fashion space in India is growing fast and is expected to be reach US$15 billion by 2020. The digital fashion space has seen three types of participants including specialized fashion portals, broader e-commerce portals and retail chains launching their online portals. With the overall market expanding fast, currently there is room for a large number of players and it will be interesting to see which of these will take the lead going forward.