Online beauty retailer Purplle.com, has raised $ 33 million at a valuation of $1.1 billion entering the unicorn club. The company said it has raised the Series E-round from South Korean investor, Paramark Ventures along with existing investors Premji Invest, Blume Ventures, and Kedaara.

Despite fund-raise challenges

So far, the beauty platform has raised $215 million from investors in four rounds. It had closed Series D round of $140 million in 2021. It enters the unicorn club at a time when start-ups are facing challenging times in terms of fund raises due to macro-economic factors.

Manish Taneja, Co-Founder and CEO, Purplle.com told BusinessLine, “Overall we have now more than $100 million in cash. We will be investing this capital to fund our growth through marketing and strengthening fullfillment centres network, among others. We will also use the funds to strengthen our technology and data capabilities for more efficiency and better user-experience. We have made some strategic investments in the past and we will continue to look at more acquisitions but very selectively and look to work with like-minded founders,” he added.

The beauty platform in the past acquired Carmesi and the India business of Faces Canada. It also has a portfolio of its own brands including Good Vibes, Purplle and NY Bae.

“We are currently at a GMV annualised run rate of about $225 million. I think we have balanced growth and profitability really well over the past few years and have been growing at over 70 per cent year-on-year. We expect to continue to grow at 60-70 per cent going forward as well. A large part of this growth is coming from new customers trying our platform and brands as well as repeat buyers beside offline retail. Only about about 5-7 per cent of the growth is pricing-led in lieu of inflation,” he added.

The beauty retailer currently sells its brands-Faces Canada and Good Vibes across 5,000 stores and plans to take them to a much larger number of stores backed by sharp marketing strategies.

Responding to a query on the impact of the macro-economic challenges, Taneja said, “There are some headwinds largely due to inflation and we would have probably grown even faster if these were not there. Given the Indian beauty industry is pegged at over $20 billion, we are strongly positioned for the next phase of accelerated growth.”

The beauty platform now has over seven million monthly active users and sells over 1,000 brands on its platform besides its own portfolio of brands.

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