Indian Gifts Portal, which enables users to send gift to their loved ones to India, USA and UK, has today announced that it has raised around $2 million in its latest funding round.
In this funding round, the family office of Naveen Arya, one of the three promoters of Karamchand Appliances has invested. He has invested in his personal capacity. Along with that, Tarun Joshi, the India director of UK-based private equity firm 3i has also participated.
The funding amount will be used by the company to develop machine learning technology for the company’s gift discovery platform indiangiftsportal.com. The company will also spend money to build a strong senior-level management team.
Indian Gifts Portal (IGP) was previously an entity of IndiaMART, an online B2B platform for small and medium sized businesses. In 2012, Tarun Joshi bought out the entity and then roped in Rahul Garg as chief executive in January 2015.
The portal provides gifting options in over 190 product categories, including edibles, perishables, toys and games, apparel and home, among others. For the company, flowers and cakes are top product categories, followed by personalised products and hampers.
Now, the company is planning to offer personalization option for all of its product offerings. This newly raised funding round will definitely give boost to this plan.
The company operates on an inventory-based. It also charges commission to its vendors, for flowers and cakes. As per the company’s founder, the firm has done sales at a run rate of Rs 40- 45 crore in the past 12 months.
Indian Gifts Portal opened its Bengaluru office last year, which is focused on technology and product. It has appointed former Rocket Internet India HR head Anbika Wadhwa to lead the firm’s HR vertical.
It has also appointed former director of technology at Zivame, Bhupendra Singh Dhami, as chief technology officer, Neha Agarwal, a former Jabong executive as SEO (search engine optimisation) and content marketing head and Kamal Upadhyay, former Redbus executive, as vice president of product management.
In this space, Indian Gifts Portal competes against the likes of Giftxoxo, CheersOye!, QwikCilver and ForMyShaadi. Recently, QwikCilver raised around $10 million and has also launched Woohoo, a C2C gift card trading platform.
