The parent company of direct-to-consumer cosmetics business MyGlamm, the Good Glamm Group, is the latest Indian startup to enter the unicorn club.
Prosus Ventures and Warburg Pincus have contributed $150 million to the Mumbai-based startup’s Series D funding round. Alteria Capital, as well as current investors L’Occitane, Bessemer Venture Partners, Amazon, Ascent Capital, and the Mankekar Family Office, participated in the fresh round, which valued the four-year-old business at $1.2 billion post-money.
Its value has increased by a factor of 12 since it was valued at $100 million in March of this year. When MyGlamm extended and finished its Series C fundraising round in July, company was valued at $300 million.
In the beauty and personal care industries, MyGlamm’s parent company works as a house of brands. The great majority of its items are sold through its own website, app, and over 30,000 retail locations.
The company is one of the first in India to have had success in combining content and commerce to boost sales. Its content offering, which is backed up by a network of over 220,000 influencers, assists clients in spotting new items and encouraging engagement.
MyGlamm is aggressively acquiring businesses to enhance its offers, as seen by Tuesday’s announcement. Darpan Sanghvi, co-founder and CEO of MyGlamm, told TechCrunch that the company has invested around $270 million in stock and cash in recent months to acquire a number of companies that meet the company’s goal.
MyGlamm, which already paid over $65 million for direct-to-consumer (D2C) mother and infant care company The Moms Co, is closing agreements to buy four more businesses by the end of the year, according to Sanghvi.
MyGlamm’s inorganic expansion strategy has paid off, as the company just acquired POPxo, a business that has developed a community around content, influencers, and commerce. In the last year, POPxo, created by Priyanka Gill, who joined MyGlamm as part of the purchase, has boosted the larger firm’s commerce. In the interim, POPxo’s user base has grown to 88 million, up from 60 million in July, according to Gill in an interview.
Sanghvi, who founded MyGlamm in 2017 after pivoting his prior firm, has made a significant comeback. In a previous interview, he talked about the difficulties he had getting funds for a direct-to-consumer company that was not as prominent in the world’s second-largest internet market only five years ago. To make matters worse, MyGlamm was one of the last direct-to-consumer companies to launch during that wave.
MyGlamm co-founder Naiyya Saggi stated that the company has already reached EBIDTA break-even and that the fresh funds would be used as a war chest as it grows. MyGlamm aims to start expanding internationally in the second part of next year, she said in an interview.
Good Glamm Group also intends to register for an IPO in around two and a half years.
In recent years, a number of direct to consumer firms, particularly in the beauty and wellness industries, have made substantial gains. Nykaa deserves a lot of credit for opening the way for them. The fashion commerce startup, whose initial public offering (IPO) was oversubscribed by more than 80 times, will begin trading on local Indian markets on Wednesday, with the final issue price projected to increase by more than 50 percent.