Fund raising: Lenskart raises USD 220 million from global investors
Virendra Pandit
Mumbai: India’s leading online start-up retailer for eyewear and related products, Lenskart, has raised USD 220 million (Rs. 1,647 crore) from investors including Temasek Holdings Pte and Falcon Edge Capital, in a fresh sign of resurging interest in the country’s technology start-ups.
The company will use this fresh infusion, along with USD 95 million raised earlier this year from KKR & Co., to expand online sales and add brick-and-mortar stores in India, as well as in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, according to media reports on Monday.
Piyush Bansal, 37, who founded Lenskart in 2010, said the start-up’s valuation has soared to USD 2.5 billion now. The company sells eyeglasses, contact lenses, and sunglasses online and through about 750 retail outlets in the country.
Bansal set up Lenskart Solutions Pvt Ltd in the industrial town of Faridabad near New Delhi and was backed early by Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp. Despite the pandemic, it became profitable.
It sold about 8 million pairs of eyewear in 2020 and is aiming to grow that by 30 percent by March 2022. The combined market opportunity in India, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia are projected at over USD 15 billion by 2025, Lenskart said.
“India is the world capital of blindness and about half of its 1.3 billion people need glasses,” Bansal said.
Lenskart plans to make investments in its supply chain and new technologies. It is setting up a new manufacturing plant in Rajasthan, the world’s largest, for ready prescription glasses, with a capacity of making 150,000 pairs a day.
The company recently set up the Lenskart Vision Fund to invest USD 2 million each in select start-ups working in eyewear, eye-care and related retail segments.
Lenskart’s digital offerings include a virtual 3-D tool for trying on glasses, and the Artificial Intelligence face-mapping to help with frame recommendations.
This fresh infusion of funds in India’s tech start-up ecosystem is part of the boom in this domain. Global investors are pouring billions of dollars into India’s start-ups, minting more unicorns than ever before, media reported.
For example, food-delivery app Zomato Ltd. became the nation’s first unicorn to make its stock-market debut, raising USD 1.3 billion recently. The digital payments start-up, Paytm, has also filed a Draft Red Herring Prospectus (DRHP) for what could become India’s biggest IPO ever.
