Fynd, online fashion retail start-up, gets funding from Google, others

Bengaluru: Fashion e-commerce platform Fynd (Shopsense Retail Technologies Pvt. Ltd), which lets offline retailers sell online, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding in its Series C round led by Google, the company said in a statement on Thursday.

The round also saw participation from existing investors, including Kae Capital, IIFL, Singularity Ventures, GrowX, Tracxn Labs, Venture Catalyst, Patni family office and Hong Kong-based Axis Capital, apart from undisclosed angel investors.

Co-founded by Farooq Adam, Sreeraman M.G. and Harsh Shah, Fynd provides an omni-channel retail product to brick-and-mortar stores, allowing stores to list their entire channel inventory on Fynd’s online e-commerce marketplace.

The company said it will use the latest round of funding to enable the platform to enhance the way it engages with consumers and retailers in an improved manner.

Till date, the company has raised more than $3 million in disclosed funding. Fynd secured $3.4 million in its Series A round in June last year. Apart from this, it raised $500,000 from Silicon Valley-based investor Rocketship.vc in May 2017.

Currently, Fynd works with around 300 offline retailers, including affordable, mid-range and premium brands. For every transaction handled by the Fynd platform, the company charges around 20- 25% as commission depending on the cost of delivery and other metrics, co-founder Harsh Shah told Mint in an earlier interview.

The startup incurs delivery cost of Rs65-80, depending on the destination and origin of the package, and hence charges a higher commission fee of 20-25% per order, added Shah.

Apart from online sales, Fynd also assists brands in sourcing stock units from other stores in case customers don’t find the right fit or colour of a product. Big fashion retail brands usually operates more than one outlet in a city, and the biggest problem they face is unavailability of colour choices or fitting sizes, according to Shah.

Using a product called Fynd Store, customers can browse through all available products of a particular brand on touch screens placed inside the brand’s physical outlet. Fynd Store links the entire stock-keeping unit (SKU) of an offline brand and displays every product on a touchscreen tablet, and not just stocks from a single store, thereby providing more choice to the customer.

The company claims to operate pan-India and does not own any warehouses or logistics unit. “We work with third party delivery companies. We believe in having no inventory, including warehouse and logistics fleet. We are simply a tech platform,” said Shah.

“Fynd has built an impressive, tech-first platform that has tremendous potential to scale within and beyond fashion and India… (Its) unique store-driven commerce approach, without inventory or warehouses, gives it a unique position in the marketplace,” said Seema Rao, head of corporate development - India, Google.

Fynd competes with other similar platforms like Ace Turtle which provides an e-commerce solution for retail brands, and portals like Shopify (based out of Canada) and Shopmatic which provides e-commerce software to sellers.