Myntra raises funds via Premji Invest

Online fashion retailer Myntra.com has raised a fresh round of funding from a group of investors led by Premji Invest, the investment company floated by Azim Premji, Chairman of Wipro.

Founded by Mukesh Bansal in 2007, Myntra's total equity capital raised now stands at $125 million, contributed by - apart from Premji Invest - investment firms Tiger Global, NEA-IUV, IDG Ventures and Accel Partners. The site has about 50,000 fashion products from over 600 brands.*

As per Comscore data, Myntra had the highest number of unique visitors, 24 million, in December 2013 among e-tailing sites, closely followed by another fashion site Jabong.com which had nearly 20 million unique visitors.

Flipkart, the market leader in terms of revenue in India recorded 13.22 million unique visitors. Last year, around April, Myntra made a strategic move by acquiring San Francisco-based Fitiquette which offered a technology platform for solving fitting and size issue while buying clothes online.

Recently, the company also acquired private label fashion e-retailer Sher Singh which is run by Exclusively.in.

While speaking to Business Today about a month back, Mukesh Bansal had said that Myntra had an annual revenue run-rate of Rs 1,000 crore and was very confident of scaling this up to Rs 4000 crore in the next two years. The company has aggressive growth plans. "We aspire to become the largest fashion brand in India, taking together online players and offline companies like Shoppers Stop and Lifestyle," he said.

Fashion is a huge category and even horizontal players like Flipkart are betting big on fashion. The margins vary from product to product but on an average, they are attractive at 30 to 40 per cent. "The unit economics in fashion play out very well, as compared to things like electronics which are high value products but with margins as thin as 8 to 10 per cent," said Bansal. "That doesn't even cover logistics costs."

Bansal is unfazed by the increasing competition. He counts on the fashion content on his site. "Fashion conscious consumers also look for content like look-books, trend videos, how-to style up videos and stuff, which we have. A fashion conscious consumer needs an online fashion ambience also," says Bansal.

(* The story has been updated with the amount in the latest round of funding and corrects the total amount raised by Myntra so far)