Weekly Rundown: Purplle, Good Glamm beef up beauty play with acquisitions, Norwest closes $3 bn fund

Purplle and Good Glamm have made acquisitions this week as they seek to further their positions in the fast-growing online beauty and personal care segment. 

Content-to-commerce unicorn Good Glamm Group acquired MissMalini Entertainment in its first personality-driven brand acquisition. 

With an ambitious goal of creating South Asia's biggest personal and beauty care conglomerate, the Mumbai-based company has so far added seven brands under its umbrella.  

The deal, which is one of the largest buys by the company, is a stock-cash mix transaction. MissMalini, which started as a lifestyle blog in 2008, is now accessible to 60 million users with an umbrella of girl community app (Girl Tribe), MissMalini Media (influencer and content marketing), Ignite Edge (talent management), and Agent M Creative (creative agency). 

Also Read: Purplle acquires FACES CANADA to strengthen its makeup footprint

Besides, MissMalini's Bollywood outreach is one of the most significant aspects of the group's acquisition by the Good Glamm Group.

Purplle has snapped up cosmetics and skincare brand FACES CANADA. The brand will join Purplle's cohort of owned and acquired beauty brands including Good Vibes, Carmesi, and NYbae. 

With its products available across Asian, European, and North American markets, FACES CANADA expands Purplle's consumer offerings and offers it an international makeup portfolio. 

Purplle claims to have a catalogue with more than 1,000 brands and 50,000 offerings, across categories including, makeup, skincare, haircare, personal care, fragrances, and grooming appliances. 

Meanwhile, education infrastructure start-up Teachmint made its first acquisition this week as it bought course-selling platform Teachmore in a cash and stock deal. 

Teachmore enables teachers sell educational products like online courses, live classes, quizzes and more through their own apps and websites. The deal comes a little over a month after the company raised $78 million in its Series B round of funding. 

Multi-stage investment firm Norwest Venture Partners closed a new fund at $3 billion, bringing its total capital under management to $12.5 billion. The company said it will continue to employ a multi-stage, multi-sector approach to investing in startups across consumer, enterprise and healthcare sectors. 

Also Read: Good Glamm Group acquires MissMalini Entertainment in its first personality-driven brand acquisition

The fund invests globally, with offices in North America, India and Israel. Its India portfolio includes Swiggy, Mensa Brands, Pepperfry, OfBusiness and Xpressbees.

Revenue Based Financing (RBF) platform Klub announced the first close of its new fund, Aceler8, at Rs 200 crore.

The fund will back consumer and SaaS businesses for their marketing, inventory, and CAPEX spends.  

Homegrown social network platform and short-video content app Moj's parent, ShareChat led the funding charts this week. It raised $266 million as part of its Series G round at a valuation of $3.7 billion. 

The investment was led by Alkeon Capital with participation from new and existing investors including Temasek, Moore Strategic Ventures (MSV), Harbourvest and India Quotient. This is the third round of funding for the startup in 2021. 

Healthtech unicorn Innovacer secured $150 million in a Series E funding round, tripling its valuation to $3.2 billion.

The funding round was led by the Mubadala Capital, and also saw participation from existing investors B Capital Group, Microsoft's M12 fund, OMERS Growth Equity, Dragoneer, Steadview Capital, Tiger Global Management, and new investors Whale Rock Capital Management, Avidity Partners, and Schonfeld Strategic Advisors. 

The San Francisco-based company had entered the unicorn club earlier this year at a $1.3-billion valuation. 
Fintech firms Uni and JusPay, SaaS from Hevo Data, and dialysis chain NephroPlus also drew significant venture capital cheques this week.