Little Black Book (LBB), a platform to find and shop from local brands and businesses, has raised $5 million in Series A led by Inventus India and IAN Fund. Japanese investors Dream Incubator and Akatsuki Entertainment Technology (AET) Fund and existing investors Blume Ventures and Chiratae Ventures also participated in the round.

The funds will be used to expand the tech and product team with a focus on machine learning for discovery and integration of content.

A web and app based platform, LBB started off as a content and discovery platform for places, services, restaurants, events, weekend getaways, fashion and activities.

Recently, commerce was launched on the platform, which reaches over three million users a month; users are connected to 60,000 local brands and businesses across eight markets including Delhi, NCR, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Pune, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Chennai. The LBB app has seen 6,00,000 downloads.

“We are seeing a 30 per cent month-on-month growth in products sold through LBB, since we launched commerce four months ago. Ninety-five per cent of the local merchants on LBB do not sell on other marketplaces like Amazon, or Flipkart... 60 per cent of the active users log 30 sessions per user per month,” Suchita Salwan, co-founder of LBB told BusinessLine .

Nearly 70 per cent of the content, information and reviews on LBB is generated by its users. Of the 700-900 posts created, only half that are curated by LBB are retained on the platform. Co-founded by Suchita Salwan and Dhruv Mathur, LBB has raised $7.5 million till date.

Rutvik Doshi, Managing Director, Inventus India, said, “What attracted us most to LBB is how they’ve made community a continued narrative in their promise to make local brands and businesses more accessible. They have demonstrated their ability in building a platform that consumers love, while also building a robust monetisation model that’s powered their growth.”

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