Amidst falling scale, Urban Ladder bags Rs 15 Cr internal round from existing backers

Online furniture retailer Urban Ladder has been struggling to raise follow-on capital after its Series E round in 2017. As a result, the company kept cutting cost and laid off over 40% of its workforce since the beginning of this year. 

One of the company’s co-founders also left the company last month whereas Vani Kola had resigned from its board of directors. While Urban Ladder is undoubtedly in bad shape, the company has just received Rs 14.9 crore from existing backers - SAIF Partners, Steadview Capital and Sequoia Capital.

According to the RoC filings, the trio has contributed about Rs 4.96 crore each in the fresh financing round. The filings further reveal that the Ashish Goyal led company has issued and allotted 8,352 Series E cumulative convertible preference shares (CCPS) at a price of Rs 17,850 per share.

Importantly, Kalaari has not participated in this internal round.

Last month, one of the two co-founders Rajiv Srivatsa resigned from the operational role in the company. Apart from the funding crunch, its plan to turnaround business also didn’t go well when several veteran executives, including Ajit Joshi resigned from President and COO roles from the company in April this year.

Urban Ladder had claimed to turn profitable at the EBITDA level in July. However, the claim also appears far from being materialized. Meanwhile, the company’s volume (transactions) has fallen drastically owing to massive cut on marketing, promotion and discounts. It has also shut down several verticals after downsizing the overall team size from its heydays.

So far, the seven-year-old firm raised about $105 million in total funding from SAIF Partners, Sequoia Capital, Steadview and Kalaari.

Despite mass lay-offs and other struggles, Urban Ladder has continued to open new brick & mortar stores. Only last month, it opened a 4,000 sq ft store in Pune. At present, it has about a dozen stores operating across cities including Chennai, Bengaluru and Delhi.