Little Black Book bags $5 Mn Series A round led by Inventus India and IAN

Content startups had taken a backseat in being able to raise decent funds in the past few months as investors have shown more generosity to fintech and agritech. Now, in a sigh of relief for the content space, Delhi-based startup Little Black Book has picked up a funding round.

Inventus India and IAN Fund have led a $5 million Series A round in the company. Japanese investors Dream Incubator and Akatsuki Entertainment Technology (AET) Fund, and existing investors Blume Ventures, and Chiratae Ventures also participated in the round.

Little Black Book is a lifestyle portal that provides a recommendation for everything from places, fashion, and food to theatre and shopping across eight cities including NCR, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Pune, Hyderabad among others.

Currently, it’s present in 18 categories that recommends local indulgence such as travel, restaurants, shopping, and nightlife. With the new fund, it's expected that the company will expand into more cities and integrate activities on the platform.

While LBB certainly an option for millennials to hunt local activities and places,  it requires to work when it comes to updation of existing recommendation articles that have lost their relevance due to outdated information.

Nevertheless, LBB has transformed the traditional information and recommendation space by weeding out noise from the crowd of businesses vouching for attention. The company's chemistry with business partners seem to be on track and it can also be gauged from its financial performance in FY18.

LBB had seen a 2X jump in revenue in FY18 from Rs 3.24 crore to Rs 6.62 crore, while the losses had shown a minor 27.8 per cent increase from Rs 3.71 crore in FY17 to Rs 4.74 crore in the fiscal year ended March 2018.

These are the signs pointing out to a business showcasing sustainable growth.

So far, to fuel this growth, the company has raised over Rs 50 crore from Blume Ventures, IDG (Now Chiratae), Indian Angel Network (IAN) and Singapore Angel Network. In October 2017, it secured Rs 6.5 crore led by Blume.

It would be interesting to see how the company has performed in the fiscal ended 2 days ago, and if this funding in LBB brings better news for other startups in the content space as well.