Ziffi.com plans to raise up to $20 mn in series B funding

In the previous round, the company had raised Rs 15 crore from Orios Venture Partners

Ziffi.com, an online discovery and booking space for beauty salons, doctors and diagnostic centres across beauty and wellness space, is in talks to raise $10-20 million in Series B round of funding. In the previous round, the company which is backed by some of the well-known angel investors such as Google's Rajan Anandan and India Games Founder Vishal Gondal, had raised Rs 15 crore from Orios Venture Partners.

According to Shantanu Jha, chief executive officer and co-founder, the company is looking at scale up its business by expanding to other cities after following encouraging response to its newly-launched mobile app.

"After the app launch, we have seen our bookings grow 27 times," said Jha adding that about 95 per cent of the bookings come through the app.

Currently, Ziffi.com offers salons, doctor and health test bookings in four cities including Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad and Bengaluru. The company plans to expand to 25 more cities and scale up the technology accordingly. It also plans to add new verticals, including on-demand home services, to its portfolio.

The Mumbai-based company was founded in 2010 by four alumni of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay and IIT Kharagpur--Shantanu Jha, Keerthi Kiran Chennupati, Anshuman Pandey and Pushkar Soni.

Ziffi.com was formerly known as Docsuggest.com and was later changed its name with an aim of widening its focus area across health and wellness spectrum.

The online booking and discovery platform provides salons, spas and stylists with an application on which they can manage appointments coming through Ziffi.com portal as well others. The application also helps them to run their loyalty and reward programmes and discounts.

While the consumers are not charged for the services, on the health bookings side, Ziffi.com charges a fixed fee per booking from the service providers.

About 45 per cent of the customers end up booking multiple services on the platform, added Jha.

The company currently has around 10,000 spas and stylists listed on its platform that includes 3,500 salons and spas. In addition, about 21,000 doctors and 8,000 hospitals, pathological and diagnostic centres are also listed on the platform.

In India, there are multiple players who offer online services in the specialized segments such as beauty and health care. While Practo is a major player in the health care segment, companies like Purplle and Vyomo have already cracked their way through in beauty and wellness space.