Fynd, an online clothing retail startup, receives funding from Google and others

Bangalore: Fashion e-commerce platform Fynd (Shopsense Retail Technologies Pvt. Ltd), which enables retailers to sell online, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding in a Series C funding round led by Google, the company said in a statement on Thursday.

Existing investors including Kae Capital, IIFL, Singularity Ventures, GrowX, Tracxn Labs, Venture Catalyst, Hong Kong-based Patni family office and Axis Capital also participated in the round, in addition to undisclosed angel investors.

Fynd was co-founded by Farooq Adam, Sreeraman MG, and Harsh Shah. The company offers brick-and-mortar stores an omni-channel retail product, enabling them to list all of their channel’s inventory on Fynd’s e-commerce platform.

The company said it will use the latest round of funding to enable the platform to improve the way it interacts with consumers and retailers.

The company has raised more than $3 million in disclosed funding to date. Fynd secured $3.4 million in a Series A round last June. It also raised $500,000 from Silicon Valley investor Rocketship.vc in May 2017.

Fynd currently works with around 300 offline retailers, including affordable, mid-range and premium brands. For each transaction that Fynd processes, the company charges around 20-25% commission, depending on the shipping cost and other metrics, co-founder Harsh Shah told Mint.

Shah added that the startup incurs a delivery fee of Rs 65-80, depending on the destination and origin of the shipment, hence it charges a higher commission of 20-25% on each order.

In addition to online sales, Fynd also helps brands source SKUs from other stores in case customers can’t find the right fit or color for a product. Large fashion retail brands typically have more than one outlet in a city, and the biggest problem they face is a lack of color choices or the right sizes, according to Shah.

Using a product called Fynd Store, customers can browse all of a brand’s available products on touchscreens placed at the brand’s physical point of sale. Fynd Store aggregates a brand’s entire stock keeping unit (SKU) offline and displays each product on a touchscreen tablet, rather than just the stock from a single store, giving the customer more choice.

The company says it operates pan-India and has no warehouses or logistics units. “We work with third-party delivery companies. We believe in zero inventory, including a warehousing and logistics fleet. We are simply a technology platform,” Shah said.

“Fynd has built an impressive, technology-first platform that has the potential to scale immensely across the fashion industry and in India and beyond… (Its) unique approach to store-based commerce, with no inventory or warehouses, gives it a unique position in the market,” said Seema Rao, India director, corporate development, Google.

Fynd competes with other similar platforms such as Ace Turtle, which offers e-commerce solutions for retail brands, and portals such as Shopify (based in Canada) and Shopmatic, which offers e-commerce software to merchants.