Lenskart, the leading online eyewear shopping platform, has managed to secure investments amounting to a total of more than ₹600 crore (approx. $88.3 Mn) over the last twelve months. Owing to the growth of their eyeglasses business, the company is now looking for potential acquisitions to better the scope of their product categories, technologies, and after-sale services to reign at the pole position, reports ET.
This New Delhi-based upstart has revolutionized the eyewear market of the country and a cohort of marquee investors including the likes of PremjiInvest, TPG Growth, IDG Ventures, International Finance Corp, and Adveq have backed them. As part of its recent funding round, it has even received an undisclosed investment from India’s most iconic businessman, Ratan Tata.
With its flooding coffers, Lenskart is now on a hunt for either some early-stage startups or companies that are now on the cusp of releasing its innovative technologies to the masses. It plans to shell out as much as $10 million for an acquisition of their product or pick up majority stakes in innovative early-stage ventures from India as well as abroad. Talking about the same during an interview, chief executive Peyush Bansal says,
We are looking at companies that are innovating in the eyewear space from ventures that are working on eyewear instruments, startups working in the virtual reality space, technologies related to developing new types of lenses and portable eyewear equipment anything that makes eyewear more affordable and available to the masses.
We aren’t interested in acquiring companies for their customers. We want them for the innovation, specifically in eyewear, that they are undertaking
He further mentions that their primary focus for deploying the capital infused in the company is two-fold. Firstly, upgrading its technologies to further enhance the customer’s buying experience through online, offline and omni-channels. It would, in turn, lead to the development of the eyewear market in the country as well.
This is only possible by collaborating with companies who’ve either developed their product, are in the stage of testing or are suffering from a cash crunch due to funding slowdown. Lenskart wants to give them a platform to get back to the drawing board, test technologies on their platform and gain feedback. The company has recently debuted the 3D eyewear testing module on their mobile app. It enables you to scan your face and develop a 180-degree rotatable 3D model of the same to test the spectacles on.
Operating since 2008, Lenskart now has an annual revenue rate of over ₹350 crore and is now planning to reach as high as ₹2,500 crore in the next four years. It currently has sold eyewear products to nearly 600k customers but plans to reach over five million consumers by 2021 by expanding its offline retailer network. Thus, the company plans to open 1,000 brick-and-mortar shops through the franchise model.
