IvyCap Ventures invests in beauty and grooming e-commerce venture Purplle.com

Purplle.com, a leading beauty and grooming e-commerce platform in India today announced that it has raised Series A round of funding from IvyCap Ventures. The funding is primarily for aggressively growing its marketing efforts and fulfillment capacity.

Founded in 2011, Purplle.com has been an early mover in the online beauty space. It raised angel funding from marquee Indian angel investor groups and has grown at a robust rate through 2014. The company is now well poised to aggressively grow sales through its e-commerce platform, and expand beyond e-commerce to salon listings, discovery, and related rich content and intelligent features.

Speaking on the occasion of the announcement, Manish Taneja, Co-founder and CEO of Purplle.com said, "It is an exciting phase of our growth journey. We have clearly demonstrated cost efficient scale up in our beauty products market place business and are making rapid inroads into the beauty services market. With this round of funding, we are confident we will establish ourselves as India's top destination for beauty."

Beauty and wellness e-commerce is one of the largest potential market segments in India that is yet to see a dominant player emerge in India, and Purplle.com has taken an early head start in the space. It now boast the widest variety of Indian and International beauty brands across pricing points amongst similar players in the category, and significant repeat buying behaviour. Internationally beauty and wellness has been fertile grounds for the creation of several billion dollar start-ups in recent years - Jumei.com (China), Sephora, Birchbox being a few.

"We strongly believe several e-commerce verticals remain relatively untapped in India, and that niche players with rich content and in-built intelligent discovery features are going to be the next wave of value creation, especially in the Indian context. Against this backdrop, beauty and wellness is of particular interest, as it is a fast growth sector with inherent loyalty characteristics far beyond many other verticals. Purplle.com has attracted our interest and capital, due to their razor sharp focus on executing a vertical specific strategy, and due the team's significant capabilities and vision" said Vikram Gupta, Founder and Managing Partner, IvyCap Ventures.

Gupta will be shortly joining the board of Manash Lifestyle Pvt. Ltd. on behalf of IvyCap Ventures. IvyCap invests in startups and growth stage companies across sectors including technology, education, energy, healthcare and agriculture. Its recent investments includes Reuters Market Light, Aujas Networks,Vinculum, FieldEz Solutions, E-Shakti and Leixir Labs.