Wooplr, an online marketplace for womens clothing, has today announced that it has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Anand Chandrasekaran. The new funding raised by the company will be used for marketing and to further develop its products.
Commenting about this development, Arjun Zacharia, co-founder and chief executive officer of Wooplr, said,
Anand is a visionary who knows how to build products. Given his participation, we will be able to learn from his experience and tap into his wide network to grow.
As per reports, Anand Chandrasekaran has invested around $25,000 to $30,000 as part of a larger funding round, in which Wooplr has raised about a million dollars from Astarc Ventures in October this year.
Before raising $1 million from Astarc Ventures in October, the company had raised a funding round from the founders of InMobi – Naveen Tewari, Abhay Singhal, and Amit Gupta and Piyush Shah, Chief Product Officer at InMobi, Raghunandan G, Co-founder, Taxi for Sure and ex-Puma India CEO Rajiv Mehta. Prior to that, it had raised $5 million from Helion Ventures and over $140K from MakeMyTrip CEO Deep Kalra and a few others angel investors in September 2014.
Wooplr, based in Bangalore, was founded in 2012 by Soumen Sarkar, Arjun Zacharia, Praveen Rajaretnam, and Ankit Sabharwal. It is a social shopping platform that allows people to recommend their favorite products and stores in the city and share it with their social circles.
The platform enables people to discover new products from local stores around them through recommendations from friends & other social influencers. Based upon the shared content and various other parameters like location and interests, it presents a personalised, curated feed of fashion products to help users get to know about fashion products in local stores.
Anand Chandrasekaran recently joined Facebook as a Director and has been allocated the task to further push its Messenger app to the masses. He worked as the senior director of mobile and search products at Yahoo between 2011 and 2014. Later, he was hired by Airtel as a Chief Product Officer, where he quit after just one year. In 2015, he joined Snapdeal as a CPO. He left Snapdeal after just 1 year and 2 months.
Anand has also become a prolific angel investor. He has invested between $25,000 and $50,000 in around 15 startups, including food technology firm InnerChef, healthcare company Pluss, dating platform Aisle, among others.
