Waterbridge Ventures Backs Short-video Driven Social Commerce Startup Eloelo Eloelo has raised USD 450,000 (about INR 3.29 crore) in seed funding round and will use it to build the core team, work on new product initiatives and user acquisition
By Shipra Singh
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Short-video driven social commerce platform Eloelo on Friday announced that it has raised USD 450,000 (about INR 3.29 crore) in seed funding round led by Waterbridge Ventures.
A clutch of angel investors, including Livspace CEO Ramakant Sharma, Rishi Vasudev, former SVP at Flipkart, TS Raghavendra of Qikwell, Ujala Cygnus Hospitals founder and director Shuchin Bajaj, Apaksh Gupta, CEO, OneImpression, Vasant Rao of AutoNinja) and AppyHigh Group, also participated in the funding round.
Founded in March 2020 by Akshay Dubey and Saurabh Pandey, both of whom are former employees of Flipkart, Eloelo allows its users to create, share and view short videos on beauty, health and lifestyle. The 60-second videos curated on the mobile application are shared by top influencers, consisting of expert advise, product reviews and beauty and health tips.
The platform claims to be the lifestyle destination for the Bharat millennial user.
"Eloelo's vision is to empower the Bharat millennial user to look good, feel good daily with a platform that blends content-community-commerce for beauty, health and lifestyle. Our core belief is that short-video content blended with a community that acts as a safe space is the future for a category like beauty and health where the user seeks bite-sized information like tips, product reviews, etc before making a commerce decision," said co-founder and CEO Pandey.
The Bengaluru-based startup saw an overwhelming organic traction within 15 days of its app launch with 20,000 users, of which over 80 percent were from non-metro cities, downloading the app and nearly 7 lakh actions—watching videos, posting questions, claiming elo-coins—on the platform.
Eloelo said it will deploy the fresh fund in building the core team across tech and non-tech roles, working on new product initiatives and user acquisition.
Commenting on the deal, Ravi Kaushik, Partner, Waterbridge said, "We invested in Eloelo as part of our dedicated funding programme Fast Forward which we ran at the peak of the pandemic. The founders are deeply entrenched in what we call as Social Commerce 2.0 and are marrying content, community and commerce in the health, wellness and beauty verticals. We believe this is a deep vertical where both content and community can be tailor-made to solve discovery and distribution for multiple brands while creating a platform for users to drive commerce through trust, product discovery, short format content, tips and recommendations."
