Venture Catalysts facilitates pre-Series A investment into fashion re-commerce platform CoutLoot
New Delhi, August 04, 2017: Venture Catalysts, India’s first integrated incubation platform, recently facilitated an undisclosed pre-Series A investment into CoutLoot, India’s most favourite fashion re-commerce platform for buying and selling pre-loved fashion items. The funding round was led by investor Anuj Puri, and also saw participation from Artha India Ventures, Sidharth Kothari, VCats President Dr. Apoorv Ranjan Sharma,Dheeraj Jain of Redcliffe Capital and others. All participating investors were a psart of the Venture Catalysts investor network.
Originally incepted as a selling-only platform in Mumbai, CoutLoot currently provides its services in 14 cities across India. It has achieved more than 1,00,000 app downloads, processes more than 200 daily orders and see’s over 1500+ daily listings, has revamped over 50,000 closets in the last year alone. Currently re-selling clothes, bags, shoes, and accessories, the service also has exclusively partnerships with leading celebrities to re-sell items from their own personal closet through its ‘Celebrity Closet’ feature.
Commenting on the latest round of funding, Dr. Apoorv Ranjan Sharma, Co-founder & President, Venture Catalysts, said, “The young and diverse team at Coutloot has ensured that the platform is emerging as arguably the most significant player in the huge and untapped preloved fashion segment. In the ‘shared economy, fast fashion’ space, CoutLoot has emerged as a disruptive organization. Being the leader in this segment, it is the only service provider that focusses on curation & has the largest ticket size in this segment. We are proud to be associated with this platform and believe that this round of funding will help them immensely to further expand their product and client base, along with developing technologies to make the entire process more seamless for its users as well as expand all over India.”
Elaborating on the allocation of the funds raised, Jasmeet Thind, Co-founder of CoutLoot, said, “The funds will be utilized towards scaling up, hiring consumer-driven talent, and marketing, as well as to build a bigger buyer-seller fashion community in the country. With the current addressable market size estimated to be around $88 billion, there is a huge business volume/value potential in this space. As CoutLoot sees high repeat rate on both seller and buyer sides, we are confident of getting new users and converting them to repeats. With the funds providing us with a major shot in the arm, we are looking to build a robust business, with profitability now only a few months away.”
CoutLoot follows a highly-curated listing model for its products, along with a strict rejection procedure which discards a product if it does not meet the platform’s standards of quality and authenticity. This helps the platform in minimizing the return rates while driving higher repeat purchases. Apart from its app & website channel, CoutLoot also has an on-ground channel called “Pop up shops”, wherein an average of Rs 3 lakh worth of stocks are sold via flea markets & exhibitions at every event.
CoutLoot which is co-founded by Jasmeet Thind, Mahima Kaul, Sahil Khimavat & Vinit Jain is backed by Facebook as a part of the FB start program, the company is one of the key players changing the landscape of fashion re-commere in India.