Mumbai-based online self-care and beauty product retail platform Purplle has raised $33 million in it’s series E fundraise, pushing the firm’s valuation into the unicorn stratosphere at $1.1 Billion. This makes them the second new Indian unicorn this week, after edtech Physics Wallah turned unicorn in their maiden funding round. The round was led by South Korean VC Paramark Ventures. Existing backers Blume Ventures, Kedaara and Azim Premji’s Premji Invest also upped their stake and made contributions in the round.
In a statement, Manish Taneja, Co-founder and CEO, said “The infusion is an opportunity to further our mission of building the beauty industry in India with technological investments, scaling of our private brands, and industry-first innovations.”
Purplle has now raised a total of $215 Mn, and has formerly gotten investments from Goldman Sachs and Verlinvest. The company plans to use the proceeds from this round to improve technology, develop it’s private lables and strengthen its product.
Founded in 2012 by IIT alumni Manish Taneja, Rahul Dash and Suyash Katyayani, Purplle is an online self-care and beauty product marketplace. The app currently offers about 60,000 products from over 1,000 brands. They also run their private label for beauty products. The company draws it’s marketshare from the young,middleclass strata of society, since the big-box beauty stores are few and far apart, and not to mention, usually have a price range higher than a middle class person would be comfortable spending.
Purplle handled $180 million of gross merchandise value in the year ending March 2022. The company has 2400 employees, and acquired cosmetics brand Faces Canada last year.
Ever since the pandemic, the online beauty product marketspace has seen an unprecedented boom, at the forefront of which there haven’t been the big flashy names of the industry, but newer startups like Nykka, Purplle and MamaEarth. Purplle is the chief competitor of the bigger player Nykka, who also runs a private label, and had a blockbuster IPO launch last year and is valued at 8.7 billion.
