Bengaluru: GOAT Brand Labs secured around $36 million in Series A funding, which includes equity and debt. Tiger Global and Flipkart Ventures led this funding round with the participation of Nordstar, Better Capital and other angel investors.
Including Daily Hunt’s Virender Gupta, Udaan’s Sujit Kumar, Manipal Group’s Dr Ranjan Pai, BharatPe’s Suhail Sameer, Texport’s Neeraj Goenka and Alex Kuruvilla, MD – Conde Nast India.
GOAT Brand Labs (GOAT) founders Rishi Vasudev and Rameswar Misra aim to help D2C brands with a tech-enabled plug and play platform to accelerate their growth.
“GOAT stands for Greatest of All Time. Through this venture, we are bringing together passionate entrepreneurs, their D2C brands, marquee investors, industry experts and a dynamic team, who believe in the philosophy of partnering and nurturing. We want these brands to have access to the best resources so that they scale rapidly to become GOAT’s,” said Rishi Vasudev, Co-Founder of GOAT Brand Labs.
He added that G.O.A.T will fuel the exponential growth of D2C brands across all channels – marketplaces, the brand’s e-commerce platforms, offline retail and global markets too with a tech-enabled platform for end-to-end integration replete with deep digital marketing expertise. G.O.A.T’s integrated platform will help the brands maintain high efficiency and gain from economies of scale.
Previously, Vasudev worked as Flipkart’s Group Head – Fashion (Flipkart and Myntra) and as CEO of Calvin Klein India, Lifestyle Departmental Store & Home Centre. In past, Misra co-founded menswear brand Turms and previously worked as SVP – VOONIK. He has first-hand experience in creating, launching and scaling brands in the D2C space.
The GOAT founding team comprises senior leaders with deep expertise in Brand building, Digital marketing, Fashion design, M&A and Operations at scale.
“The potential of the D2C market in India will only continue to grow and GOAT. Brand Labs is well-positioned to effectively tap this while helping brands scale. We are excited to partner with Rishi, Rameswar and the team, as they build their tech-enabled platform and make the best resources available to native brands” said Scott Shleifer, Partner, Tiger Global.
“Our investment in GOAT Brand Labs is aligned to this intent, as we aim to work with early-stage startups that have the potential to address emerging business and consumer requirements leveraging the power of technology. The leadership team at GOAT have deep experience in this segment and we look forward to the transformation they will make in the D2C segment,” said Ravi Iyer, SVP and Head – Corporate Development, Flipkart.
“We are excited to partner with D2C brands and their passionate founders. The post-pandemic world will see a boom in e-commerce penetration in India and with this comes an opportunity for bigger and more organized brands and sellers. GOAT aims to be a reliable partner for these brands and sellers by providing them tech-driven solutions to scale quickly,” said Rameswar Misra, Co-Founder – GOAT Brand Labs.
GOAT is in advanced discussions with at least 10 brands for acquisition and would be announcing the same shortly. They are looking at brands in fashion, beauty, personal care, and home and kitchen in the first phase.