Indian wedding portal, The Wedding Brigade has raised over $1 million in a Pre-Series A Extension round of funding led by Japan-based AET fund & Blume Ventures. The other participating investors include Allana Group and other angel investors. This round will be primarily used to scale TWB’s latest business- creating and operating high-quality wedding banquet spaces, as well as to continue to invest in their existing content and e-commerce businesses. Born out of deep consumer insight & the company’s core vision to enable stress-free weddings, this service aims to offer a reliable, seamless wedding experience that is integrated with the rest of the offerings on their online platform.
Sanna Vohra, the Founder & CEO said, “In India, the annual spend on weddings is considered to be about USD $40-50 billion dollars (most of which comes from the middle class), and the wedding venue, food and decor costs typically make up 60-65% of the overall wedding budget. However despite being such a large part of the overall spend, banquets that cater to the middle class are often poorly maintained, lack high-quality food and décor options, and provide no services that add that “wow” factor to the wedding, or make families feel taken care of. By managing the actual wedding ceremony, we will finally be able to offer an end-to-end stress-free solution for couples planning their wedding- from finding ideas on our blog, to shopping for clothing and jewelry on our e-commerce platform, to booking vendors through our concierge service, to finally hosting and executing the actual wedding in one of our banquets.”
“Our vision as a fund has always been to enable heart-driven businesses to create scalable and impactful solutions, and TWB is a perfect example of that. The wedding industry in India is extremely dynamic and fragmented, and we believe it has immense potential. To see a young company disrupting this age-old industry with an array of online and offline innovations is incredible. We're really excited to partner with Sanna and her team to bring some exciting industry-first disruption to the wedding space!" said Yuki Kawamura, Principal, Head of India Investments, AET Funds.
Sajid Fazalbhoy, as part of the investment team of Blume Ventures, added “We have witnessed The Wedding Brigade’s exciting journey over the last couple of years from a purely content platform to a formidable online / offline brand that solves the pain points in the wedding planning process. We are happy to continue to support the company as it looks to scale its offerings immensely within the coming year.”
Prior to this round, The Wedding Brigade had raised $1 million which was also led by Blume Ventures, with participation from other investors including Czar Capital, Mountain Pine Capital, Lets Venture investors, and the Keiretsu Forum. And they had also raised over $500K in their seed round in the year 2016.