Angel investors bet big on fashion start-ups

Fashion and lifestyle space in India is no longer a taboo for angel investors as the growing number of investments show. This year so far, six investments have been made, up from four in 2015 and one in 2014. The value of the investments made stood at 38 million dollars (Rs 253.16 crores) in 2015, which was up from 21 million dollars (Rs 139.90crores) in 2014.

StylFlip, a social platform to sell and shop pre-owned apparel and accessories got an undisclosed sum from real estate developers Raj Gala Shah and Zaheer Memon. Fashalot, an online to offline location based store discovery platform got pre Series A round of funds from YourNest Angel Fund. Jaipur-based fashion retail platform Yufta raised Series A round from Ajay Dutta, a founding member of the Rajasthan Angel Investor Network. Hippily, a Mumbai-based shopping personalisation app, raised 250,000 dollars (Rs 1.66crores) in seed funding from investors like Sridhar Ramaswamy , senior VP, ads and commerce at Google and Rakesh Mathur, Founder of Junglee.

The spurt in investments is a sign of the changing demographics in India and shows how the customers are evolving every day. And this has led the investors to put in their money where they can see growth.

The top fashion deals of 2015 were: Voylla which got 15 million dollars (Rs 99.95crores) from Peepul Capital; Relevant E-S, Woolpr and Clovia got 5 million dollars (Rs 33.32 crores) each from investors like Tiger Global, Helion Ventures and IvyCap Ventures, and Voonik got 6.5 million dollars (Rs 43.31crores) from a funding round led by Sequoia Capital.