Footwear start-up Yoho has raised Rs 20 crore in a Series A round of funding. The investment was led by Rajeev Mishra, chief executive officer of Softbank Vision Fund, Rukam Capital and Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder of Paytm, along with participation from other investors.
Mishra, Rukam Capital and Sharma were part of the start-up’s seed funding round in 2021.
Other investors who also participated in this capital raising included Sequoia Sprouts, Kunal Shah, founder of Cred, Pankaj Chaddah, co-founder of Zomato and Shyft, Gaurav Agarwal, co-founder of Tata 1mg, Taru Kapoor, general manager-India and Southeast Asia for Tinder, Saurabh Vashistha, co-founder of Simsim, Ashneer Grover, founder of BharatPe, Mukund Kulasekharan, chief business officer-India of Urban Company, Tanmay Saksena, chief operating officer of Tata 1mg and Abhinav Sinha, chief operating officer of OYO.
Commenting on the latest investment round, Ahmad Hushsham, founder, of Yoho, said, “This funding has come at a crucial time and will help us invest in new technology to build new product propositions and scale.”
The fresh round of funding will help Yoho create capabilities for new product propositions and sustainable manufacturing standards. Hushsham, a fashion industry expert and Prateek Singhal, a consumer tech expert and an IIT Delhi graduate, founded the company in 2021. The start-up aims to leverage technology and AI-powered solutions to manufacture affordable, high-performance footwear.
With their trademarked Footpharma technology, Yoho has already patented designs with some universities in footwear. It now aims to capture a pie of the Indian footwear market estimated to be a $13.49 billion market with a 12.83 per cent CAGR as per a recent report by Maximise Market Research.
Singhal, founder of Yoho added, “We started with the idea that the majority of the most loved footwear brands are global, leaving multiple foot problems of Indians unsolved. India has a different climate profile and a different feet profile. Moreover, truly comfortable footwear in India is unaffordable and largely inaccessible beyond metros. We hope to combine the power of technology and IoT with the science of feet to make footwear that our feet deserve.”
“India's digitally native segment has the potential to take the global market by storm at the back of an aggressive consumer-centric product innovation strategy and this is a space that we have been extremely passionate about. Yoho's focus on bringing affordability to high-quality footwear can transform the way consumers perceive the impact of the right type of footwear on feet health. We are confident in their product proposition and the strides they have made in such a short period,” noted Archana Jahagirdar, managing partner of Rukam Capital.
The direct-to-consumer (D2C) brand claims to have sold over one lakh pairs of footwear after coming out of stealth mode four months back, with just three unisex products—Bubbles, Waves, and Breeze—across most e-commerce platforms. Before launching the product lines, Yoho created almost 700 prototypes to get the right product line that was comfortable and long-lasting.