Shouto Technologies Pvt Ltd, which runs fashion discovery firm Shouto.app, has secured pre-seed funding of $1.6 million (around Rs 12.4 crore) led by Saama Capital, with participation from Amit Singhal (former head of search at Google), Whiteboard Capital and Arjun Vaidya (Founder of Dr. Vaidyas), among others.
The company plans to deploy the fresh proceeds to
invest in product development, creator acquisition and engagement and building a team of engineers and creator success managers.
Founded by former Myntra, AJIO and Amazon executives Ramgandhi, Abhishekk Handa and Ayyappan Lakshmanan, ShoutO aims to build an online fashion shopping experience targeting Gen Z and young millennial consumers, offering them a platform to discover and shop premium fashion brands as well as discover private labels.
The platform has over 60,000 monthly active users, which the company claims is a 510% jump month-on-month. It aims to onboard 500,000 monthly active users by December this year.
“Discovery is an untapped market, especially in the fashion segment as large fashion marketplaces are focused on serving the large brands or building for the masses. They do not address the nuanced fashion needs of GenZ and young millennials entirely. We surveyed a large set of shoppers in this target segment, and found 52% of them to spend a lot of time searching for the right styles before making a purchase,” said Maruthy Ramgandhi, Co-founder and CEO, Shouto.
“On an average, they visit 3 to 4 brand or marketplace websites. This discerning consumer group also seeks to stand out and fit in at the same time and relies heavily on authentic voices in the creator industry to influence their choices. 62% of them feel their fashion choices are influenced by creator content on Instagram or Pinterest,” he added.
Saama Capital has its origins in 2006. It was part of SVB Capital.
The company’s maiden fund had a corpus of around $54 million. In April 2018, the investor raised $100 million (~Rs 650 crore) for its latest vehicle – Saama Capital IV Ltd – from 59 investors.
Saama Capital’s investments include SKS Microfinance, Veeba, Paytm and Bluestone.
