Beauty startup Purplle raises $45 mn from Sequoia, Verlinvest, others

Beauty e-tailer Purplle has closed a $45-million funding round from Verlinvest, Sequoia Capital India, Blume Ventures, and JSW Ventures. Existing investor Ivy Capital partially exited the startup with 22X gains. The investment will further accelerate the brand’s ambition to deliver 10 times growth in 4-5 years from now, said the company.

“Even with a Covid year, we have delivered over 90 per cent GMV CAGR for the last 3 years. This, while scaling our private brands successfully. Good Vibes is already a Rs 150 crore brand. The investment will help to shape Purplle into a multibillion-dollar, digital-first, beauty and personal care enterprise,” said Manish Taneja, Co-founder & CEO Purplle. 

Sequoia Capital which has made early-stage bets on unicorns like BYJU’S, OYO, Ola, Zomato, and Freshworks said it is seeing a growing trend towards the gentrification of e-commerce in India.  

“Purplle has cracked the beauty playbook of value retailing with 3 key tenets – a business built on high retention and low customer acquisition cost, a wide assortment of brands offering quality at best prices, and an attractive private label portfolio mix. We see Purplle emerging as a dominant beauty destination as the online beauty penetration grows from 10 per cent to over 25 per cent over the next decade,” said Sakshi Chopra, Principal, Sequoia India. 

On delivering 22X growth to IvyCap Ventures, Vikram Gupta, Founder & Managing Partners, IvyCap Ventures, said: “We have invested in Purplle from our Fund 1 and Fund 2. With an initial investment of Rs 15 crore from our Fund 1 growing by manifolds to Rs 330 crore, our partnership has been rewarding. We continue to believe in the growth of the company and therefore we have retained our stake for Fund 2.” 

Founded in 2012, Purplle has around seven million monthly active users with over 1000 brands and nearly 50,000 products available on the platform. 

According to a RedSeer report, the domestic online beauty and personal care market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 9 per cent, from $15 billion in 2017 to $23 billion by next year. Nykaa is one of the biggest players in the segment which is planning an IPO at a valuation of $3 billion by 2022.