Six months old Mensa Brands becomes unicorn; claims profitability

E-commerce roll-up firm Mensa Brands has raised $135 million in its Series B round led by Falcon Edge Capital’s Alpha Wave Ventures. Existing investors Accel Partners, Norwest Venture Partners and Tiger Global Management. Prosus Ventures (formerly Naspers) have also invested in Mensa in this latest funding round.

According to Mensa, it has raised a total of more than $300 million in equity and debt and the new funding round was picked up at over $1 billion. 

Mensa Brands has outpaced professional networking platform Apna to become the fastest Indian startup to turn unicorns. As per Fintrackr’s estimates, Mensa was valued at around $250 million during its last tranche in September. 

Ola Electric and InMobi’s Glance were the other two companies to have attained $1 billion valuation within two years of their inception

The Bengaluru-based company will use the funding to invest and acquire direct to consumer brands, hire across functions and ramp up tech infrastructure. 

Significantly, the six-month-old company also claims to have hit profitability. However, it doesn’t disclose any revenue and profit numbers.

Mensa partners and invests in digital-first brands across fashion and apparel, home and garden, beauty and personal care and food and scales them exponentially. To date, the company claims to have partnered with 12 brands, the majority of which are growing at 100% year-on-year since their integration with the company.

Mensa directly competes with GlobalBees, Goat Brand Labs, Evenflow, 10club and Powerhouse91. All of them have raised funds this year and as per media reports, GlobalBees may become another unicorn from the e-commerce roll-up space.

Overall, 37 startups have attained unicorn status in 2021 and Good Glamm Group, Curefit and Mensa are the latest entrants which raised their fresh round in November only. In October, six companies: Licious. CoinSwitch Kuber, Rebel Foods, MobiKwik, CarDekho and Acko had checked into the coveted club of unicorns.