Online eyewear marketplace LensKart has secured around Rs. 400 crore in its fresh funding round, led by International Finance Corp, a private sector investment arm of the World Bank.
In this Series D round of funding, the company’s existing investors – TPG Growth and IDG Ventures India also participated. Also, Zurich-headquartered asset management firm Adveq Management has also invested in this round.
As per the reports, IFC has invested around Rs. 171 crore to lead the round. Also, many angel investors such as Ratan Tata and Kris Gopalakrishnan has also invested in the company, in their personal capacities.
The company has not revealed any further details related to this funding round, including the valuation of the company at which the funding was raised.
The amount raised in this round will be used by the company to further augment its lens manufacturing and assembly capabilities, and strengthen its supply chain. It is also planning to penetrate further into India’s tier-3 and tier-4 cities.
The company’s manufacturing, processing, and assembly facility will have features like robotic manufacturing of lenses, cutting and fitting of prescription lenses for eyeglasses with a capacity to process more than 20,000 pairs of eyeglasses daily by the financial year 2021.
Commenting about the funding, Peyush Bansal, chief executive of Lenskart, said,
The idea is to fill the large gap relating to vision correction that currently exists in India, and we were looking as to how to set up Lenskart, to try and revolutionise eyewear in India, and that really appealed to IFC.
Pravan Malhotra, lead for VC investments in South and Southeast Asia, at IFC, said,
This investment will support a rapidly growing market leader in the Internet sector, while meeting a significant gap in the Indian eye care market.
Founded in 2008 by Amit Chaudhary, the company is currently present in 70-odd cities of India and is expecting to be in 120-130 cities over the next 12 months.
It has so far raised about $36 million. Earlier, in January this year, the company raised a funding round that was led by TPG Growth, which valued LensKart at close to $100 million.
It raised $22 million in its Series C round of funding. Before that, in February 2013, the company had raised $10 million from Unilazer Ventures and IDG Ventures India. In Series A round, the company secured $4 million from IDG Ventures.
In 2014-15, Lenskart had claimed to have sold products to 600,000 consumers. It aims to reach over five million consumers by 2021 and expanding its offline presence will give a major boost to that goal.
