Women centric e-commerce venture LimeRoad raises $15 M led by TigerGlobal
While e-commerce ventures find it difficult to raise follow-up round, online social discovery platform for women, LimeRoad, has raised $15 million series B round led by New York-based Tiger Global. The round was also participated by existing investors, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Matrix Partners, India.
The investment will help LimeRoad accelerate towards its mission of becoming the most delightful lifestyle discovery platform for women in the country. Importantly, LimeRoad’s series B round is the biggest for any online commerce company since 2011.
Speaking about the investment, Suchi Mukherjee, Founder and CEO of LimeRoad, said “We are revolutionizing the way lifestyle products are discovered and ultimately bought online in India, and are delighted to work with investor partners who share our hunger for winning and are supporters of our disruptive model to get there.”
At present, 20% of the world’s lifestyle products are manufactured in India, and LimeRoad is convinced that it will conquer this market by making its discovery easy by a fresh socially-architected approach. “On an average, the community of LimeRoad users generate 3x more actions and page views per session on our platform versus any other alternative available to them in this market,” adds Suchi.
Earlier in October 2012, LimeRoad had raised $5 million series A from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Matrix Partners, India.
The company gets significant amount of traffic from devices on the go. “Our mobile traffic, most of which is organic, is growing at 45% on a monthly basis,” says Suchi. LimeRoad is also launching its Android app today, which gives style updates every 30 seconds.
LimeRoad was founded in 2012 by Suchi, Prashant Malik and Ankush Mehra. Prior to LimeRoad, Suchi had stints at eBay, Skype and Gumtree while Prashant worked with social networking giant Facebook.
The new round of investment will pump the confidence of LimeRoad as well as other e-commerce ventures, which are desperately looking to raise funds. According to our estimate, close to six decently funded e-commerce ventures are in the market to raise money. And this new round will accelerate their hopes to get the next round of investment.
