Fashion startup LimeRoad wins funding

Suchi Mukherjee gave birth to both her second child and her start-up in 2012. In fact, she was on maternity leave when she started up LimeRoad, a fashion eCommerce site targeted at Indian women. Today, it is one of the biggest success stories by a woman entrepreneur in India.

LimeRoad has just raised US$30 million from Tiger Global, Matrix Partners, and Lightspeed Venture Partners in series C funding. The same investors had pumped US$15 million into the fast-growing fashion portal less than a year ago. Earlier, at inception, Matrix and Lightspeed had invested US$5 million.

LimeRoad combines fashion eCommerce with social discovery. The site features user-generated ‘looks’ which mix and match interesting combinations of apparel and accessories. It encourages users to experiment with ‘looks’, such as a fusion of Indian and Western styles in wearing a modern crop-top with a traditional saree or finding a dupatta [light Indian women’s scarf] to go with denims and T-shirt.

A user can build collections of styles in scrapbooks on the site, which others can browse for ideas. LimeRoad’s algorithms rank the scrapbooks to make the most relevant and popular of them easier to find.

“Women from across the country are using scrapbooks as a medium for self-expression… As a result, over 80 per cent of our orders come from organic traffic,” says LimeRoad CEO and co-founder Suchi Mukherjee, in a statement on the funding.

“The uniqueness of LimeRoad lies in the passionate user base and the mission of providing an engaging platform for smaller brands to thrive,” adds Lee Fixel, managing partner at Tiger Global.

Suchi Mukherjee, who studied finance at the London School of Economics, worked for eBay in London before becoming an entrepreneur. Her co-founders in LimeRoad include Prashant Malik, who was earlier with Facebook, and Ankush Mehra, who headed the supply chain at Reliance Hypermarkets.

Fashion discovery is a hot space in India. Just last week, another fashion portal Roposo raised US$5 million in series A investment. This too was led by Tiger Global, along with participation from Binny Bansal, co-founder of eCommerce biggie Flipkart.

Started by three IIT Delhi alumni, Roposo is derived from ‘apropos’, alluding to its pitch on making the search for fashion products more relevant to user needs.