Internet first apparel brand Turms, which sells stain repellent, odour-resistant daily wear has raised Rs 6.3 crore from a clutch of angels including Freshdesk founder Girish Mathrubootham, former Reliance Retail Lifestyle president Bijou Kurien, Pepperfry founder Ambareesh Murty and former Flipkart top executive Mekin Maheshwari, along with angels from LetsVenture & AngelList India.
Other investors who participated in the round include OneAssist founder Subrat Pani, Apollo Hospitals group CFO Krishnan Akhileswaran and former Voonik and Myntra chief executive officer Prabhakar Sunder.
Furniture etailer Pepperfry has reshuffled its top management and will also be expanding its business. Hussaine Kesury, who was heading the furniture vertical, has now assumed the role of chief activation officer.
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He will be responsible for the brick-andmortar Studios, where customers can touch and feel products and then buy them online. These studios have been contributing 25-30% to the Mumbai-based company’s sales, said founder Ashish Shah.
Alok Varman, who was with Pepperfry from 2011 till 2017 and then moved to B2B ecommerce startup WYDR, is back as head of Studios. Ratika Bakshi, who was design head at interior design cost estimation startup Nestopia, has been brought on board as head of business expansion. Bakshi and Varman will report to Kesury.
Logistics optimization firm Locus expects 50% of business from international markets by next year. Currently, international operations contribute 20-25% of its total turnover. Nishith Rastogi, CEO, Locus, said that South East Asia and North America were key focus markets for the company.
“We are also looking at Jakarta and Melbourne for our next offices. There is a lot of international demand for the product coming in,” he said. The main product, FieldPro is an artificial intelligence-based product that helps enterprises optimise logistics for their mobile/field workforce.
It automates and optimizes sales beat plans for mobile workforce by preparing a day level route plan to visit several stores at a pre-defined frequency to handle order collection, visual merchandising and competitor analysis, making
it particularly attractive to consumer goods and ecommerce firms.
Amazon has started storing payments data in India locally without mirroring it in their overseas servers, people aware of the matter said. The e-commerce company is expected to achieve complete compliance over the next two weeks, in line with the RBI diktat.
Companies had expected some sort of breather from the banking regulator on this issue. But realising RBI’s stern stand, Amazon started the process of bringing India payments data within the geo-fence of the country.
