Stylitics, a startup powering outfit-based shopping recommendations for online retailers, is announcing that it has raised $15 million in Series B funding.

The company was initially known for ClosetSpace, a mobile app that provided consumers with outfit recommendations and inspiration.

While the app is still live, Stylitics’ focus has shifted to its retailer tools — for example, when you look at this blouse on the LOFT website or this shirt on the Banana Republic site, Stylitics is powering the “Ways to Wear It” and “Wear It With” widgets recommending other products that you could purchase to complete the outfit.

The company said it’s drawing on brand merchandising guidelines, engagement and purchase data from the retailer, broader trend data and stylists’ expertise to create these recommendations, which are updated as products sell out.

In an email, founder and CEO Rohan Deuskar (pictured above) added that Stylitics is able to provide useful recommendations from the start, without requiring time to train with a retailer’s data.

“We have billions of data points from powering outfitting on dozens of sites for more than four years, so we have a very good idea on Day One what an excellent and high performing outfit should look like for each product for a new customer,” Deuskar said.

Stylitics says it has driven $300 million for its retail partners — a group grown in the past year to include Ann Taylor, Calvin Klein, Chico’s, Gap, Kohl’s, Macy’s, Under Armour and White House Black Market.

The startup has now raised a total of $21 million. The new round was led by PeakSpan Capital, with participation from Trestle LP. PeakSpan co-founder Phil Dur is joining the Stylitics board.

“With the rapid growth of digital commerce, retailers are scrambling to keep pace with the consumer demand for more visually exciting and compelling shopping experiences,” Dur said in a statement.

The startup said it will use the money to grow its sales and marketing team while developing new types of shoppable content and in-store experiences.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Style recommendation startup Stylitics raises M

FreshToHome, a Bangalore-based e-commerce startup that sells fresh vegetable, fish, chicken and other kinds of meat, has raised $20 million in a new financing round as it looks to expand its footprint in the nation.

The Series B round for the startup was led by Iron Pillar, with Joe Hirao, the founder of Japan’s ZIGExn, also participating. The startup, which closed its $11 million Series A financing round three months ago, has raised $33 million to date.

FreshToHome sells “100 percent” pure and fresh vegetables and meat in Bangalore, Mumbai and Pune — the latter two of which it recently entered. It says it does not add any preservatives or other chemicals to prolong the life of the produce. (Typical meat sold by a retail store is riddled with chemicals and could be months old.)

Unlike most other marketplaces, FreshToHome has built its own supply chain network, which gives it better control over quality and delivery of the food items. It uses trains and planes to move inventory, and has become one of the biggest clients of several local airlines.

The startup sources vegetables and fish directly from 1,500 fishermen and farmers across the nation. It uses an app to negotiate with farmers and fishermen.

It continues to expand its control over all aspects of its business. “Today a large part of our poultry comes from institutional farmers. Now we are going a step ahead and processing the chicken at the slaughtering level ourselves,” Shan Kadavil, CEO of FreshToHome, told TechCrunch in an interview.

FreshToHome is able to deliver the perishables on the same day and as soon as up to two hours, Kadavil said.

The startup also began operations in UAE recently and has opened physical stores in Bangalore and Chennai.

FreshToHome has amassed 650,000 customers — up from 400,000 in late May — in 10 cities in India, and recently started to sell milk in Bangalore, another market segment that remains largely unstructured in the nation. Every day it receives 14,000 orders, and processes 20 tons of fresh food.

It recently crossed $30 million in annualized direct to consumer sales, which makes it the largest e-commerce platform serving this category. It is seeing 30% month-to-month growth, said Kadavil, who has previously managed tech support for Support, and India operations for gaming firm Zynga.

And that growth has helped the startup attract some attention. Several major players in the nation, including Amazon India that recently expanded to include perishable category and Flipkart, have held talks with FreshToHome to acquire some stake in the startup, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

And there is a big opportunity in the space. The cold-chain market of India is estimated to grow to $37 billion in next five years.

In addition to directly procuring its supplies from farmers and fishermen, FreshToHome also serves as a micro-VC, giving them access to some money upfront and resources to produce more from their farms. It also gives them an assurance that it will buy back their produce.

Kadavil founded FreshToHome with Mathew Joseph, a veteran in the industry who has dealt with fish export for more than 30 years. Joseph started India’s first e-commerce venture in fish and meat, called SeaToHome, in 2012.

FreshToHome will use the fresh capital to expand its network of contract farmers, and add 200 to 300 tons of additional produce each month.

In a prepared statement, Anand Prasanna, managing partner of Iron Pillar, for which it is the first investment in food-tech space, said, “FreshToHome’s brand proposition has been to provide 100% fresh food with 0% chemicals — not an easy thing to achieve in India at a large scale. By smartly using big data and machine learning, they have created a sustainable supply chain, which offers a fair price to consumers, fishermen and farmers, for their premium produce… We love companies that solve such hard issues in large market segments in India through unique tech enabled moats!”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | India’s FreshToHome raises M to grow its fish, meat, vegetable and milk e-commerce platform

BharatPe, a New Delhi-based firm that is enabling hundreds of thousands of merchants to start accepting digital payments for the first time each month and also giving them access to working capital, has raised $50 million as it looks to scale its business in the nation.

The Series B round for the one-year old startup was led by San Francisco-headquartered VC firm Ribbit Capital and London-based Steadview Capital, both of which have previously invested in a number of financial services in India.

Existing investors Sequoia Capital, Beenext Capital, and Insight Partners also participated in the round, pushing BharatPe’s all-time raise to $65 million. The new round valued the startup at $225 million, Ashneer Grover, cofounder and CEO of BharatPe, told TechCrunch in an interview.

Google and Amazon, both of which offer payment services in India, were also in advanced stages of talks to fund BharatPe’s Series B financing round, but the startup’s founding team was not keen on diluting their stakes especially in the wake of BharatPe’s recent growth, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

BharatPe operates an eponymous service to help offline merchants accept digital payments. Even as India has already emerged as the second largest internet market with over 500 million users, much of country remains offline. Among those outside of the reach of the internet are merchants running small businesses such as roadside tea stalls.

To make these merchants comfortable in accepting digital payments, BharatPe relies on QR codes built as part of government-backed UPI payments infrastructure. “We get them to put up a QR code in their shops, and any customer that uses a UPI-powered payments app — which is now supported by nearly every payments app in India — can pay these shop owners digitally,” said Grover.

Through BharatPe, these merchants also get access to a simplified dashboard on their phones to track the customers who owe them money and get periodic reminders.

BharatPe has amassed more than 1.5 million merchants on its platform. It processes over 21 million transactions a month worth more than $83 million, Grover said.

BharatPe also allows merchants to secure short-term loans. New merchants can secure about $500 for a period of three months from BharatPe. As merchants spend more time on BharatPe, the firm expands the amount to about $2000.

The lending business is crucial to BharatPe. Payment apps make little to no money through making transactions on their platforms. Those processing UPI payments can not even charge a small commission to merchants. “There is no money to be made in doing payments in India,” Grover said. So you charge small interest on loans.

Access to working capital is a major challenge in developed markets such as India. According to a World Bank report, more than 2 billion people globally do not have access to working capital.

Grover said BharatPe aims to use the fund to add about 3.5 million merchants in the next 12 months. The firm has more than 2000 sales people who are adding 400,000 new merchants to BharatPe each month, he said.

Rest of the money will go into financing the loans on the platform and building new solutions. Later today, BharatPe will launch a new service to connect suppliers and merchants through BharatPe so that their accounts are in sync.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | India’s BharatPe raises M to help merchants accept digital payments and secure working capital

Megvii Technology, the Beijing-based artificial intelligence startup known in particular for its facial recognition brand Face++, has filed for a public listing on the Hong Kong stock exchange.

Its prospectus did not disclose share pricing or when the IPO will take place, but Reuters reports that the company plans to raise between $500 million and $1 billion and list in the fourth quarter of this year. Megvii’s investors include Alibaba, Ant Financial and the Bank of China. Its last funding round was a Series D of $750 million announced in May that reportedly brought its valuation to more than $4 billion.

Founded by three Tsinghua University graduates in 2011, Megvii is among China’s leading AI startups, with its peers (and rivals) including SenseTime and Yitu. Its clients include Alibaba, Ant Financial, Lenovo, China Mobile and Chinese government entities.

The company’s decision to list in Hong Kong comes against the backdrop of an economic recession and political unrest, including pro-democracy demonstrations, factors that have contributed to a slump in the value of the benchmark Hang Seng index. Last month, Alibaba reportedly decided to postpone its Hong Kong listing until the political and economic environment becomes more favorable.

Megvii’s prospectus discloses both rapid growth in revenue and widening losses, which the company attributes to changes in the fair value of its preferred shares and investment in research and development. Its revenue grew from 67.8 million RMB in 2016 to 1.42 billion RMB in 2018, representing a compound annual growth rate of about 359%. In the first six months of 2019, it made 948.9 million RMB. Between 2016 and 2018, however, its losses increased from 342.8 million RMB to 3.35 billion RMB, and in the first half of this year, Megvii has already lost 5.2 billion RMB.

Investment risks listed by Megvii include high R&D costs, the U.S.-China trade war and negative publicity over facial recognition technology. Earlier this year, Human Rights Watch published a report that linked Face++ to a mobile app used by Chinese police and officials for mass surveillance of Uighurs in Xinjiang, but it later added a correction that said Megvii’s technology had not been used in the app. Megvii’s prospectus alluded to the report, saying that in spite of the correction, the report “still caused significant damages to our reputation which are difficult to completely mitigate.”

The company also said that despite internal measures to prevent misuse of Megvii’s tech, it cannot assure investors that those measures “will always be effective,” and that AI technology’s risks and challenges include “misuse by third parties for inappropriate purposes, for purposes breaching public confidence or even violate applicable laws and regulations in China and other jurisdictions, bias applications or mass surveillance, that could affect user perception, public opinions and their adoption.”

From a macroeconomic perspective, Megvii’s investment risks include the restrictions and tariffs placed on Chinese exports to the U.S. as part of the ongoing trade war. It also cited reports that Megvii is among the Chinese tech companies the U.S. government may add to trade blacklists. “Although we are not aware of, nor have we received any notification, that we have been added as a target of any such restrictions as of the date this Document, the existence of such media reports itself has already damaged our reputation and diverted our management’s attention,” the prospectus said. “Whether or not we will be included as a target for economic and trade restrictions is beyond our control.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Megvii, the Chinese startup unicorn known for facial recognition tech, files to go public in Hong Kong