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Bangalore-headquartered startup Chumbak Design Private Ltd, popularly known as Chumbak, has received a second round of Series B investment from Matrix Partners India. While the exact amount of investment has not been disclosed, Matrix leads the investment with participation by existing seed investor, Seedfund India.
Chumbak raised $2 million in Series A funding from Seedfund India in 2012. Google recently selected the company as one of three companies worldwide for a case study on how companies have successfully used Google services.
Chumbak sells its distinctive ‘India inspired’ merchandise ranging from tech accessories, bags and wallets, to souvenirs and luggage tags through 18 kiosks (150 sq ft) and 2 stores (300 – 600 sq ft) in Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune.
Chumbak merchandise is also available for sale on Flipkart, Myntra, Snapdeal and on its own site Chumbak.com.
“With this fresh investment we will expand our kiosk footprint to add 80-100 more kiosks around the country, especially in the North and West of India, as we are already well-known in the South,” Vivek Prabhakar, Founder CEO, Chumbak told Business Line.
Two stores will come up in Delhi and Pune this fiscal. “Two new categories which we introduced 6 months ago — phone cases and bags and wallets have been selling like hotcakes, we intend to expand the range of products to many more over the next six months,” added Prabhakar.
Surprisingly, at present just 12 per cent of Chumbak’s revenue comes from the Internet. “We will start investing in marketing to increase contribution from Internet sales,” said Prabhakar. The company will also invest in moving its Web site, which is built on the open source Magento platform to an in-house platform. While the focus for FY 2015 will be the India market, Chumbak will also explore international market opportunities.
“We are already present in Japan where we have partnered with a distributor who supplies to 75 stores. In Dubai we work with Virgin Megastores to retail our tech accessories. However, India still remains our focus market as we have just scratched the surface here,” said Prabhakar. Founded in 2010, Chumbak has a team of 65 people plus 80 in its kiosks and stores.
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