Mumbai-based Panoptic Solutions Pvt. Ltd. backed online fashion rental platform, Blinge has raised an undisclosed amount in its first round of funding led by Anupam Mittal, founder and CEO of People Group.
The funding round also saw participation from Livspace Co-founder and CEO Anuj Srivastava and Ankit Nagori, who quit Flipkart as chief business officer in February.
Founded in September 2015 by IITians Shashwat Gopal, Pooja Dubey and Shikhar Khanna, Blinge is a rental platform that provides designer wear, branded outfits and accessories on rent. The startup which claims to be catering to over 1,000 customers, follows a marketplace model and has a community of over 20 designers on its platform.
Gopal previously worked with Housing and Schlumberger, while Khanna was associated with Schlumberger. Dubey earlier worked with Google and PayPal.
Others startups operating in this space are STAGE 3, FlyRobe, LibeRent, Envoged and Zapyle. In December 2015, Delhi-based Technolour Dream Pants Pvt. Ltd. owned STAGE 3, had secured angel funding from a bunch of investors, including former AOL executive Nisha Sharma, Dalmia Bharat Group’s Puneet Dalmia and Stanford University professor Balaji Prabhakar. In August 2015, Envoged had received seed funding from Nijhawan Group’s Ankush Nijhawan, Mediology Software director Manish Dhingra and AMG Investment’s Gaurav Bhatnagar with participation from Former Canaan Partners’ MD Alok Mittal, Anant Goenka of Indian Express, Bollywood actor Jackky Bhagnani and Aspiring Minds CEO Himanshu Aggarwal.
Also, Bangalore-based online apparel rental platform Klozee closed its operations recently and last month, ethnic products marketplace Craftsvilla acqui-hired women clothing rental platform F2SO4.