Online furniture space has seen its shares of ups and downs in the past 6-7 years. The two major players — Pepperfry and UrbanLadder promised to change the way Indians would buy furniture. While they brought some changes to a chunk of urban buyers, UrbanLadder hasn’t been able to scale up and raise capital as compared to its peers.
UrbanLadder had downscaled operations and wasn’t able to rake in regular capital but Pepperfry managed to raise $40 million in February led by Pidilite Industries. The Series F round was announced back then but the company has recently allotted 1.55 crore preference shares to Madhumala Ventures Private Ltd and Vedantam Family Trust for a combined investment of $10 million.
Both entities are related to Pidilite Industries limited.
According to regulatory filings, the Mumbai-based venture has issued 14,780,200 Series A shares to Madhumala Ventures and 739,000 Series B shares to Vedantam Family Trust.
Entrackr’s calculation shows that Pidilite has valued Pepperfry at an estimated valuation of $462 million in its Series F round. It’s a sharp jump of over $160 million from its last round in 2019 when the firm was valued in the tune of $300 million.
Ambareesh Murty and Ashish Shah founded Pepperfry in 2011 with categories such as home and lifestyle. It works on a managed marketplace model in both offline and online formats. At present, it has 67 studios across 25 cities across the country.
During the financial year ending March 2019, Pepperfry’s total revenue increased by 47% to Rs 206.8 crore while its total expenses amounted to Rs 390.3 crore. The company clocked a loss of Rs 183.5 crore in FY19.
Pepperfry directly competes with Urban Ladder and horizontal marketplaces including Flipkart and Amazon. The organised furniture market is poised to see more competition due to Swedish player IKEA which forayed into India a few years ago. The company had opened a large facility in Hyderabad in August 2018 and about to open a similar store in Navi Mumbai.
