Beauty e-commerce platform Purplle has announced that it has raised $45 million in a Series D funding round that included Sequoia Capital India, Verlinvest, Blume Ventures, and JSW Ventures. This comes after the Mumbai-based start-up had closed a $30 million Series C funding round led by global investment banking giant Goldman Sachs in December 2019. The fresh capital raised from the round, which will put the valuation of the company at ₹ 2,200 crores, will further accelerate the brand’s ambition to deliver 10 times growth in 4-5 years from now, Purplle said in a press release.
In the release, Purplle revealed that existing investor Ivy Capital, which had bought a 30% stake in Purplle in 2015, partially exited the company with a 22X return. It sold part of its stake for ₹330 crore, making this one of the largest returns ever for a rupee fund.
“We have invested in Purplle.com from our Fund 1 and Fund 2. With an initial investment of INR 15 crore from our Fund 1 growing by manifolds to INR 330 crore, our partnership has been rewarding. We continue to believe in the growth of the company and therefore we have retained our stake for Fund 2. Our belief in the brand and the vision of its founders ‘Beauty for All’, enabled us to generate 1.35X of our entire Fund 1 from Purplle,” Vikram Gupta, founder, and managing partner of Ivy Capital said in a release. “Domestic institutional investors will have seen these kinds of returns for the first time from Indian VC investment. Domestic investors should get a lot of confidence in investing in this asset class going forward,” he added.
Founded in 2012, Purplle today has 70 million monthly active users and over 1,000 brands with nearly 50, 000 products on its website and app. It witnessed a growth of 90% in gross merchandise value (GMV) in the past three years. “The investment will help to shape Purplle into a multibillion-dollar, digital-first, beauty and personal care enterprise,” said Manish Taneja, its co-founder.
“Even with a Covid year, we have delivered over 90 percent GMV CAGR for the last 3 years. This, while scaling our private brands successfully. Good Vibes is already a ₹150 crore brand. The investment will help to shape Purplle into a multibillion-dollar, digital-first, beauty and personal care enterprise,” he said.
Sequoia Capital sees Purplle emerging as a dominant beauty destination as penetration of the online beauty market grows from 10% to more than 25% over the next decade, said Sakshi Chopra, principal, Sequoia India. She added that they were seeing a growing trend towards the gentrification of e-commerce in India.
“Purplle has cracked the beauty playbook of value retailing with 3 key tenets – a business built on high retention and low customer acquisition cost, a wide assortment of brands offering quality at best prices, and an attractive private label portfolio mix,” she said.
The startup joins a long list of similar brands that have raised capital from investors in funding rounds in recent days, including MyGlamm, Sugar Cosmetics, Mamaearth, Juicy Chemistry, and Plum Cosmetics, among others.
In the post-2020 era, the domestic online beauty and personal care market is expected to grow at an annual growth rate of 9% to $23 billion by 2022.
