Silicon Valley tech veterans to help India’s Urban Ladder ramp up innovations in furniture ecommerce

Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan pioneered internet comparison shopping in the mid-nineties with Junglee Corp, before the company was acquired by Amazon. Then they started early stage VC fund Cambrian Ventures with backing from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. They also co-founded an internet categorization engine, Kosmix, which got acquired by Walmart. And they were early angel investors in Facebook.

These internet tech veterans from Silicon Valley have now invested in Urban Ladder, a site for curated furniture in India, which raised US$50 million in series C funding earlier this month.

Tech innovation has been a key ingredient in Urban Ladder’s secret sauce. Apps like Wardrobe Configurator help buyers customize furniture they order online, and also get a sense of how it would look in their homes. So, even as Urban Ladder scales up and expands rapidly with the fresh funding, it also wants to ramp up tech innovations in mobility and data analytics, apart from product visualization. The company wants to treble the size of its tech team in the next six months.

Pain-points in furniture

Rajiv Srivatsa and Ashish Goel, co-founders of Urban Ladder

“We are thrilled to have veterans like Anand and Venky on board as investors to mentor and guide us. They have done some fantastic work in technology. It is great that they believe in the potential of the Indian ecommerce industry and are reinvesting in the ecosystem,” says Ashish Goel, CEO and co-founder of Urban Ladder.

Last November, eminent Indian industrialist Ratan Tata had made a personal investment in Urban Ladder, which is competing with PepperFry and FabFurnish to solve pain-points in the disorganized furniture and home decor space in India.