Indian design and decor startup LivSpace bags $4.6 million in first round funding

Home design and decor startup LivSpace raised its first round of funding of US$4.6 million from Helion Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Jungle Ventures.

The Bangalore-based ecommerce startup was founded by designer and architect Shagufta Anurag with IIT Kanpur alumni Anuj Srivastava and Ramakant Sharma.

LivSpace lets you pick up individual pieces of furniture as well as entire sets of furniture and other interior decor items that can go together. You can also hire a designer on LivSpace or customize the products based on your requirements. That’s their differentiation from other startups in the furniture and home decor ecommerce space, like Urban Ladder, PepperFry, and FabFurnish.

UrbanLadder recently introduced an augmented reality app named ‘Living Spaces’ which lets you virtually try out multiple options of its sofas in your living room. It also has another app which allows a customer who wants to buy a wardrobe and configure it from scratch. She can choose the size, color, and what she needs inside the wardrobe, like racks, shelves, hangers’ space, and so on. The startup raised an undisclosed amount of investment from Ratan Tata, one of India’s biggest industrialists, after a US$21 million funding round from Hong Kong based Steadview Capital, Kalaari Capital, and Saif Partners.

LivSpace hopes that its holistic interior design approach will make a difference in this growing market. Many young upwardly mobile professionals are buying new apartments costing US$1 million or more, and they typically spend 10-15 percent of that amount on doing up the apartment. Given India’s booming urban population, this represents a huge market.

LivSpace delivers its products in three cities: Chennai, Hyderabad, Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore, all of which are tech hubs with professionals migrating and settling down there. The startup is currently partnering with real estate portal CommonFloor to showcase a few of the new apartments by top builders in these cities.

See: Behind Urban Ladder’s $21M round: a sneak peek at ‘wardrobe configurator’ and ‘total furniture’