D2C beauty brand MyGlamm has closed its ₹175-crore Series C funding round with investments from Ascent Capital, Amazon and Wipro Consumer. This is the largest amount of capital raised by any D2C beauty brand in India in a single round. With the Series C round MyGlamm becomes the fastest beauty brand to cross the $100 million valuation mark in just three years of launch. This also marks one of the first investments made by Amazon in a beauty brand in India.
The company will be utilising its latest funding to invest in product development, support data science and technology research, increase offline expansion, fund working capital requirements and expand content creation capabilities and digital reach of POPxo and Plixxo.
Founded in 2017 by Darpan Sanghvi and co-founded by Priyanka Gill, MyGlamm is India’s fastest growing D2C beauty brand offering a range of 600+ cruelty-free and vegan products across makeup, skincare and personal care. While it is digital-first, MyGlamm also has over 10,000 offline points of sales across 70 cities in India.
Covid hits revenues
In 2019, MyGlamm grew 400 per cent on the back of which, it began its Series C round in early 2020 with an aim to announce the fund raise in April 2020. But with the national lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic, revenues came to a screeching halt, down to zero, as a result, the Series C round was put on hold. Once the lockdown was lifted, existing investors L’Occitane, Bessemer Venture Partners, the Mankekar family and Trifecta Capital re-initiated the Series C round with a renewed investment in MyGlamm.
“It is extremely exciting to have Ascent Capital, a prolific investor in the Indian consumer internet space, along with two incredible investors with strong experience in building brands, Amazon and Wipro Consumer, join our cap table. Through L’Occitane’s investment in MyGlamm, I have experienced first-hand the value that such investors can bring to a start-up. And we are really excited about all that we will be able to learn from both, Amazon and Wipro Consumer along with the financial rigour that Ascent Capital brings, as we move forward to fulfil our vision of building India’s largest beauty company leveraging DTC, digital, and data” said Darpan Sanghvi, Founder and CEO, MyGlamm, in a statement.
MyGlamm exponentially increased its digital reach by acquiring POPxo, India’s largest online community of women with 88 million female users and Plixxo, an influencer marketing platform with 75,000 influencers onboarded —- and at the same time MyGlamm doubled down on offline retail expansion by increasing its point of sales from 500 to 10,000 while also investing in opening India’s largest beauty experience store in Mumbai.
These moves paid off, as MyGlamm came out of Covid-19 with revenues that were nearly 200 per cent of pre-Covid levels while also achieving EBITDA profitability.