Voonik turns shoppers into fashionistas, and it just raised funding

India’s Voonik, a fashion estore, today announced that it raised US$5 million in series A funding from Sequoia Capital and existing investor Seedfund. The company had earlier raised US$400,000 in seed funding.

Voonik also serves as a personal shopping assistant, suggesting clothes, accessories, and footwear based on a user’s body shape, skin tone, lifestyle, budget, and preferences. People can shop and mix and match from styles and products across other ecommerce sites like Jabong, Fashionara, and Zovi. This allows shoppers to get personalized recommendations from across estores in a single app.

Sequoia Capital’s managing director Shailendra Singh feels that this discovery of apparel from dozens of other ecommerce sites could result in terrific user engagement, retention, and growth. The fresh funds will be used to further enhance its personalisation and style recommendation technology.

“While ecommerce portals have been extremely popular, mcommerce is increasingly becoming the de facto mode for making transactions in India,” says Sujayath Ali, CEO and co-founder of Voonik, in a statement this morning. “To add, smartphones are getting cheaper and connectivity is getting better which also makes mobile the future of commerce. With this funding, we will be focusing on innovations that would enhance our mobile platform.”

Free personal stylist

The idea struck Ali when he was very dissatisfied with the online clothes buying experience. Offline, he tried using premium brands and followed several Bollywood and Hollywood celebrities’ styles, but nothing worked. So he quit his job at Amazon as senior product manager and decided to develop an online fashion expert to help users buy the best clothes.

“If I don’t need to be an electronics expert to buy the best gadget at Amazon, why should I be a fashion expert to buy the best clothes. We want to bridge the gap between a fashion expert and a common man by providing a free-of-cost online personal stylist,” Ali tells Tech in Asia.

So if someone is looking to buy a top and their style preference is conservative, their body shape is round, skin tone is medium, and she is tall, Voonik will advise her to buy a printed knee length kurta, with sleeves that have some sort of embellishment around the neckline in order to draw attention away from the stomach.

The accessories to go along with it will be more prominent and the kurti would be teamed with chudi bottoms for a slimmer look. In addition, the colors would be brighter to bring out the best in the buyer’s skin tone.

The site has half a million products which are sourced from online fashion stores. The two-year-old startup launched its mobile app last year. It claims to serve 2,500 daily orders and is targeting US$100 million in sales transactions (GMV) in a year.