Salon chain major Naturals invests Rs 100 Cr in Vyomo, rebrands it to Naturals @Home

Salon chain major Naturals has invested Rs 100 crore in the on demand beauty and wellness platform Vyomo for a majority stake in the year old venture. With this round, Vyomo also rebranded as Naturals @Home. Naturals is one of the leading salon chains with over 550 salons spread across 80 cities in India .

The company plans to use the proceedings towards developing in-house technology and expanding footprints. Vyomo secured seed round from Cricketer Yuvraj Singh’s VC fund- YouWeCan, Aprameya Radhakrishna and Qatar Investment Authority. Vyomo's founder Abhinav Khare will be keep acting as Chief Executive Officer of rebranded entity.

The announcement come within a week of MyGlam snapping up $6 million Series A round from France-based natural beauty products chain L’Occitane and existing investors. At present, Vyomo offers services across five cities. Abhinav Khare, Founder and CEO Vyomo said:

I’m quite excited about the whole opportunity to create robust beauty platform. This industry requires experience and Naturals with 18 years of expertise in here and having served over 3 million customers, can hugely help to make this the best beauty platform.

With its 20 members team, Vyomo claims to service over 75,000 customers and has 60 percent repeat customers. The company had earlier announced less than $2 million funding from Rocket Internet. However, the deal had fallen through at the last moment.

According to a KPMG report, beauty and wellness industry in India will be $13 billion by 2017 and within MENA region it was $25.5 billion in 2014 as per the global market intelligence firm Euromonitor International. According to some industry estimates, in a large economy like India, the market size for beauty services pegs around USD 4.8 billion and it’s growing.

Naturals @Home plans launching in 80 cities over the course of the next 6 months. The industry and operational strength of Naturals will be capitalized upon for this expansion. Veena K, Founder of Naturals, adds:

We see that E-Com is the way forward. And we want to be a part of this future. Naturals has always wanted to cater to the beauty needs of all its customers. And we don’t want to restrict it to Salons. What if you are at home? We will come to you.

Vyomo competes with MyGlam, Belita, Bulbul, BigStylist, VanityCube, Getlook and Stayglad. On the lines of other on demand verticals, beauty and wellness startups had no trouble in raising seed rounds, however breaking Series A barrier has not been easy for them. Meanwhile, strategic investments in MyGlam and Vyomo are good sign for the vertical. L’Occitane and Naturals have been in salon and beauty business from a long time and their investments in aforementioned startups seem to be moving to spruce up their technology quotient.