Rocket Internet, the German-based e-commerce startup incubator from the Samwer brothers, is today announcing another round of funding for its strategy to build out its footprint into emerging markets. Today it’s the turn of Middle-East-based fashion commerce site Namshi, which is getting $13 million from Summit Partners. This is the second time Summit, a Rocket regular, has invested in Namshi, after a $1 million injection in January. To date, Dubai-based Namshi appears to have raised some $34 million, if you also count the reported $20 million from JP Morgan and Blakeney Management in September 2012. A Rocket Internet spokesperson would not confirm any of the sums apart from the most recent one, except to note that previous funding totals a “high double-digit amount.”

Namshi has been around since 2012 and currently sells products in six places — United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain. As with Amazon-owned Zappos, Namshi sells shoes and other fashion — some 550 brands in all, including well-known labels like Nike, Lacoste, Polo Ralph Lauren and Puma.

The official release from Rocket Internet notes that this will be used to “sustain its accelerated growth target,” although what that target is does not get specified. Namshi also notes that this will be used to improve the company’s fulfilment operations, moving stock to a new centralized Namshi warehouse and distribution center, away from the shared space with Aramex it currently uses.

“We see our partners’ growing support as an encouragement for us to continue serving our customers with world-class products and services,” said Hosam Arab, co-founder and Managing Director of Namshi, in a statement. “Our customers made the company what it is today. Therefore, they will be the ones to see the main benefits coming from this investment. We will further focus on providing a shopping experience like no other in the region.”

Part of Rocket’s pressure to expand comes from other competition on the ground from companies like Souq, another Dubai-based e-commerce operation. Like Namshi, Souq is riding a wave of fast internet growth in emerging markets at a time when more mature/developed regions like the U.S. are slowing down due to saturation.

It also comes at a time when Amazon itself appears to be getting more international in its ambitions for both its own brand and those that it owns, also tapping into these emerging market trends. One recent example: Amazon apparently staffing up for a bigger push into Russia with its Kindle services, which comes alongside resources also being put into a Russian expansion for fashion portal Shopbop.

International expansion makes sense for Amazon, which sells products at narrow margins and makes up for that with economies of scale. Given Rocket’s exit track record — selling portfolio companies to the likes of Groupon and eBay to aid in those giants’ international growth plans — it looks like one idea is for these startups to position themselves as acquisition targets for their U.S. counterparts. But, at the same time, Rocket is also building out businesses that follow that model and grow in their own right. Rocket Internet often rolls out multiple startups in the same region, and the idea is for these to use the same back-end systems, fulfillment operations, customer support and sales, and more to achieve their own economies of scale.

Developing markets have been a big target for Rocket Internet, with operations in Africa, Asia and Latin America in fact outnumbering those in Europe. And Summit has been no stranger to helping fund a number of these, including a recent $26 million for Lazada in Asia; $26.5 million in Linio (the “Amazon of South America”, which is funny since the Amazon runs through South America already); and $26 million in Jumia, another Amazon clone, this time in Africa.

“Namshi and its management team have done an exceptional job of growing the company, and we are happy to support the company’s continued expansion,” said Scott Collins, an MD and head of the Summit Partners London office, in a statement.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Open Compute will develop a specification and a reference box for an open networking switch and will do so from the ground up in the fashion of open-source software efforts, such as those developed by the Apache Foundation.

The OS-agnostic, top-of-rack switch will be the first developed as an open-source project with the spec developed by the Open Compute community.

“Closesd switches are still the primary way things work,” said Frank Frankovsky in an interview this week. Frankovsky is a Facebook vice president in hardware design and supply operations who plays a focal role at Open Compute. “…Networking has always had a black box nature to it. You give it a packet and it gives it back on the other end.”

According to a blog post by Frankovsky, Najam Ahmad, who runs the network engineering team at Facebook, will lead the networking project. The Open Networking Foundation and OpenDaylight group will participate with Broadcomm, Intel, VMware, and Cumulus Networks. Work on the project will begin at the first  OCP Engineering Summit, being held at MIT on May 16.

The networking specs will most likely be stripped down, compared to proprietary switches. “Scale is the hardest problem to solve,” Frankovsky said. “Simplicity allows us to trouble shoot faster.”

The network switch will be designed to be independent of the software that runs on top of it. That means customers can configure the technology in the manner that is appropriate for their purposes. The hope is that this “disaggregated,” switch will  allow for a faster pace of innovation. Frankovsky said that Facebook has found networking to be a bottleneck. The proprietary switches are not built for scale. More so they are meant for small clusters. Additionally, changes do not happen fast enough in the switches the network vendors offer. Requests go to the vendor who then prioritizes additions in the  new version.

There have been open-source hardware projects such as Raspberry Pi but none at the data center level. The need for open-source is precipitated by the surging growth of the Internet, which is forcing companies to process ever larger stores of data.

There are some companies not on the list of participants in the project. Dell, HP and Cisco are noticeably not present. My guess is we can expect to see some of those vendors joining in this open-source effort, especially as demand increases for infrastructure that is not locked down in proprietary fashion but is rather more plug and play.

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Elena Fesenko grew up in the fashion industry. Her mother worked as a buyer for Bloomingdale’s, and she herself spent time both as a fashion design student and model. Now Fesenko has translated her experience and passion for fashion into MIKA, a new startup which showcases complete outfits featuring a mix of high-end and contemporary apparel and accessories. Shoppers can buy these looks in whole or in part, sometimes even getting exclusive access to items which aren’t yet available in stores, but are rather pulled from designers’ showrooms directly.

“Putting together outfits for work or for different occasions is hard - usually, no woman dresses head to toe in one designer,” explains Ukraine-born Fesenko, who runs MIKA alongside co-founder (and husband) Sani Sanilevich. “So I had this idea to put together all the designers in one look, and to create a website,” she says.

On MIKA, which officially launches on May 14th with looks that will be swapped out every 24 hours plus support for international shipping, shoppers will be presented with what Fesenko describes as a “visually stunning shopping experience.” What that means is that instead of static images, a short, looping almost “GIF-like” video plays which shows a model in action, wearing the look in question.

Behind-the-scenes videos from the shoot, and interviews with the stylist – often a guest stylist from the industry, like a well-known fashion blogger for example – will also accompany the various looks.

To date, the company has worked with super model Bar Rafaeli (who also has equity in the company), photographers Adrian Nina and Fadil Barisha, and bloggers from Fashion Indie and Above the Law. Thirty more bloggers are lined up to work on the new site going live later this month, as well as some celebs and models which MIKA is not yet permitted to name.

Though it’s still in a beta testing period of sorts, thanks to Fesenko’s connections, MIKA has already established relationships with 120 designers, including Cynthia Rowley, Anna Sui, Vince, Norma Kamali, Elie Tahari, Yigal Azrouel, DL1961, Kara Ross, Sigerson Morrison, and Tracy Reese, who have agreed to offer their items for use on the site.

Fesenko explains the designers were happy to work with MIKA, because so much online fashion is offered at discounts, as with excess inventory. “We offer the items at full price,” she says, “and we shoot them in amazing editorial with the best models, and the top photographers in the industry.” Because of this setup, some of the designers have even offered some of their items to MIKA which will have them for sale before they arrive in stores.

In the last month, the company sold over 40 complete looks and over 150 single items, despite not having marketed the site – word got out through those in the industry who heard about what MIKA was up to. Some items even sold out. “We have a few thousand users, but we didn’t expect to have sales since we were focusing on different things, like acquiring designers and building our website,” says Fesenko. (The screenshots show the upcoming website, which is an update from the one that’s live today). MIKA sees a 60 percent margin on the items it sells, and offers free shipping or hand-delivery to NYC-based users.

The company closed on $500,000 in seed funding in June 2012, which included investment from the founders, friends and family, Plug & Play (Saeed Amidi), Ronnie Stern and Allen Peters. In February, MIKA closed a Series A of $1.2 million from Hillsven Capital (Bobby Lent), and Plug & Play.

The updated version of MIKA will launch on Tuesday, May 14th, but you can visit the current site here to register and shop.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Last month Skimlinks, the platform that allows publishers full control over affiliate links and content monetization, completed a growth financing round led by Greycroft Partners and others, while expanding into Asia. This month it has new products to roll out, launching two major initiatives. The question is, how does it stand up to the competition?

The first new product is called Showcases, which is a visual alternative to the in-line-text offering its had for some time.

Showcases are ad units that sit alongside content and populate automatically based on the products mentioned in an article, geo-targeted to the user. It means publishers don’t have to manually add an image to illustrate an article, like this.

Secondly, Fashion Engine, instead of identifying products that include model numbers or brand names, finds product references that use entirely normal English words, e.g. “Kim Kardashian was seen wearing a black leather dress.” This vertical-optimized semantic engine is thus aimed at fashion publishers, such as here and here.

Alicia Navarro, co-founder and CEO, says competitors don’t offer these kinds of products: “Both VigLink and RewardStyle don’t offer an accurate automated in-text/near-text solution geared towards fashion publishers. It is really hard to do well in non-techy verticals, and we have built the means to do it, at scale, in real-time.”

They also plan to expose the API behind this new service. It sounds bold but Navarro says they want to become the “Twilio of e-commerce with our path towards open APIs for all our products.”

But competitors have a few words to say about these moves.

When asked, Oliver Deighton, VP of marketing of Viglink, takes slight issue with this. He says VigLink Insert has been optimized since 2012 for over a dozen categories and the VigLink catalog API already enables publishers to “create custom and highly visual shopping experiences.”

Oliver Krohne, Founder & CEO of Yieldkit says “Alicia is right that verticals beside tech are different as you don’t have proper names like “iphone” or “galaxy tab”… However, approaching the standard ad spaces means also facing harder competition in terms of CPM rates, which you receive from all ad networks or Adsense. So it will be a challenge to exceed those.”

Navarro, however, has words for these guys. “VigLink Insert was launched a while after our SkimWords product, but their solution has never been real-time… and it is a simple word match solution, rather than ours which is a trained natural language processing engine… we don’t know of a single fashion site running VigLink Insert.”

“YieldKit’s comments are true, some publishers do place us in standard ad unit places, but we encourage publishers to create new real estate for Showcases alongside content, rather than placing them in peripheral ‘ad’ spots. As we evolve Showcases we will weave in behavioural optimization and even richer content so we achieve comparable earnings to traditional ‘ads.’”

Whatever the case, the race is on to capture this market, and Skimlinks seems to be making most of the running right now.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Looks like Lockerz, the social commerce and photo sharing service, may be moving on to yet another chapter in its life.

After laying off 30% of its Seattle HQ staff, closing down its San Diego office, and shutting down its Plixi photo sharing API earlier this year, the company is now launching a new fashion site, Ador. A tipster tells us that Lockerz is shutting down altogether and relaunching, but as of right now, the Lockerz site looks like it is still operational. Ador, meanwhile, is in an invite-only phase. We have reached out to the company to confirm what is going on.

The launch of Ador, in any case, is one more sign of how Lockerz continues to search for new ways of bringing in more users and scale to its service. Lockerz was founded in 2009 and built an early reputation as a place to post photos to share on sites like Twitter — a service that may have proven popular, but perhaps difficult to monetize. That operation picked up extra challenges after other photo sharing services like Instagram emerged, and Twitter took photo sharing into its own hands. Indeed, Lockerz claimed that it was Twitter’s changing terms of service that led it to close down its Plixi API. A second source tells us that the Plixi API had driven “90% of the traffic to Lockerz.com and its mobile site.”

Lockerz has to date raised $43.5 million in funding. Investors include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Liberty Media, DAG Ventures and Live Nation, with the most recent round, a $7.5 million venture round, coming in October 2012.

While we can’t confirm whether or not Lockerz is pivoting or rebranding, what we can see is that Lockerz has registered a trademark for “Ador,” along with “A Ador” and (bizarrely) “A”. “A ADOR is a product and service created by Lockerz, Inc.,” the Trademarkia entry reads. Ador is also currently hiring an iOS developer in Seattle.

An about page on Ador.com, meanwhile, describes a fashion-focused site where people can collect images that they like and share them with others, as well as use the site to purchase the items, and track when tagged items go on sale.

In other words, Ador’s services are very similar to those being offered on Lockerz, which has been transforming itself from a photo sharing service into a photo sharing service with a fashion/celebrity/e-commerce angle to it. “Discover the latest in fashion, beauty and entertainment,” the Lockerz site reads today. “Get rewarded for sharing what you love with our community of stylish shoppers.” In February 2012, Lockerz updated its look with a Pinterest-style grid layout and infinte scrolling.

When we covered the layoffs in January, we noted that key employees, such as head of mobile Daniel Marshalian, were still working at the company. According to Marshalian’s LinkedIn profile, he has now left. Mark Stabingas — who took over as CEO of Lockerz after founder Kathy Savitt the role left to become CMO of Yahoo — is still there. (Savitt remains chairperson.)

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

E-commerce is booming, but shopping for clothing online can still be a challenge. Unlike many consumer products, clothing is personal and often needs to be tried on for fit. Plus, there are numerous options available via the web, so sometimes it’s tough to even know where to begin with an online shopping expedition. Two companies from TechCrunch Disrupt NY’s Startup Alley are addressing these problems by offering personal stylists and recommendations online. One, Stylit, is targeting women and another, Black Tag, is focused on men.

Stylists-as-a-service? Yep, it’s that kind of thing.

Tel Aviv-based Stylit’s co-founder and chief stylist Maya Kramer has a decade’s worth of experience in the fashion industry: She’s worked as a stylist herself, as well as a personal shopper, photo shoot producer, boutique owner, fashion writer, styling instructor, model and even TV personality. Her clients have included Vogue, Sak’s Fifth Avenue, Microsoft, Glamour, Target, Victoria’s Secret and various celebrities, designers and artists. Others on the founding team include CEO Yaniv Nissim, CTO Michael Gutkin, and lead engineer Shilo Ayalon.

“We feel that personal styling was not accessible to everyone,” explains Kramer. “Stylit solves this.”

After signing up on the website, users are prompted to fill out a questionnaire, detailing their budget, body type, and personal tastes. Stylit’s personal shoppers will then curate a selection of outfits based on these answers. The outfits, sent out on a weekly basis, don’t just include the clothing, but also accessories like shoes, bags, hats, jewelry, etc. Users can choose to buy the outfit and/or the individual items, or just pass altogether. But to help the stylists better learn their own personal tastes, users are also asked to rank the outfits they’re sent, allowing the recommendations to improve over time.

Unlike with many stylists in the offline world – and even some found online – there’s no charge to use Stylit’s personal shopping service. Instead, the company is monetized through affiliate sales for now, though Kramer explains that longer-term, the company could work with brands directly to help them connect with those who best fit their target demographic. In addition, the company wants to eventually build each of their users their own personalized stores that provide items that fit their body type and style preference, says Kramer, who calls this bigger vision a “Pandora for online shopping.”

The stylists work for the site on a freelance basis. This differentiates the service from those offering more of a crowdsourced approach to fashion inspiration, because it’s about making a personal connection and learning about a user’s individual tastes to find unique outfits built just for them.

Founded in April 2012, Sylit launched into beta this January and now has around 1,000 users.

Meanwhile, Palo Alto-based Black Tag takes a similar approach with online styling but with a service that’s targeting men and their fashion needs. Explains co-founder and CEO Damon Pace, “I hate shopping and have a hard time finding products that fit me because of my height,” he says. “People should be able to shop together and it should be more personalized.”

He and co-founder James Greene have been working together on various products since 2005, and decided to build Black Tag to scratch their own itches, so to speak. The service just launched today.

After signing up, users fill out a quick profile offering details about their budget, height, weight and body type, among other things. They can then follow brands and other personal shoppers on the service who can recommend items, and they can also make requests for specific items, such as a tan blazer or a blue sweater, for instance. Users can also sign up to become personal shoppers themselves, which makes the service a bit similar to the female-focused shopping site The Hunt, which also defers to the crowdsourced model of connecting passionate online shoppers and fashionistas with those in need of hope.

The site also features a social shopping component, which allows users to shop with their spouses, friends or others with similar interests.

Before today’s launch, Black Tag had run a private beta with some 750 users. The site currently offers more than 700,000 items, from 6000+ brands and more than 60 stores. Like Stylit, the service is free to use and  generates revenue through affiliate sales. But, adds Pace, “we believe there are many different business models in e-commerce that have yet to be discovered.”

Black Tag is a bootstrapped service and still needs a little polish in some areas. But given its target demographic, how “pretty” the site looks right now may not be the top concern, just so long as it works.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When many people think of direct-selling, they envision Tupperware parties or pink-suited women lugging cases of cosmetics door-to-door. New direct-selling companies, however, are using social media to disrupt the industry. Chloe & Isabel is part of the new wave of startups currently re-defining direct selling, and giving people with an entrepreneurial bent–in particular young women–a way to leverage their social medial contacts into a business.

Launched in 2011 by Chantel Waterbury and based in New York City, Chloe & Isabel stands out with a strong focus on branding, a selling platform with data analytics that integrates social media networks, and a business model that gives the company’s hand-picked merchandisers opportunities to move into management roles.

Waterbury’s first experience with direct selling was during her freshman year of college when she sold Cutco knives door-to-door to pay her tuition. She became one of Cutco’s top sales representatives on the West Coast, selling almost $30,000 worth of knives in three months, and kept the gig for three years.

After graduating, Waterbury spent 14 years working in the fashion industry, developing jewelry brands for retailers including Target, Macy’s, Gap, LVMH, and Kenneth Cole. While on maternity leave, Waterbury began working on a business plan for a direct-selling startup that would target Generation Y college graduates, who were hit with particularly high rates of unemployment during the global economic crisis.

Thinking back on her own direct-selling experience, Waterbury realized that the industry could offer new opportunities for social media-savvy entrepreneurs.

“In the past 20 years, even the past 125 years, there hasn’t been any innovation within the industry. That shocked me,” said Waterbury. “I had experience building brands and I thought this is an opportunity to do something I love and, more important than that, create an opportunity for young women to become their own bosses.”

Chloe & Isabel quickly gained traction among investors. The company has raised $11.75 million so far. That amount includes $3.25 million in a seed round led by First Round Capital, Floodgate Fund, and angel investors including SV Angel Ron Conway, Founder Collective’s Caterina Fake, Felicis Ventures’ Aydin Senkut, The Consigliere’s Mike Duda, Red Swan Ventures’ Andy Dunn, Forerunner Ventures’ Kirsten Green, and Ashton Kutcher, and a $8.5 million Series A round led by General Catalyst Partners.

Chloe & Isabel finds its merchandisers by interviewing potential sellers, and only selects 10 percent of the people who apply. The company gets 70 percent of an item’s selling price, while the seller gets 30 percent cut.

Each seller gets access to a proprietary platform that helps them set up an online storefront, and leverage and monetize their online social capital with real-time data analytics that look at click-throughs from their blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. Chloe & Isabel’s strong emphasis on branding helps merchandisers attract buyers. The company is named after the two kinds of consumers the company wants to reach: “Chloe” is a fashion-forward trendsetter, while “Isabel” represents the brand’s more classic and timeless side.

Another way the company sets itself apart from traditional direct-selling models is by moving away from multi-level marketing.

“There is a pyramid multi-level marketing compensation structure where you refer your friends, but then you no longer have a business because they’re also selling merchandise or getting it at a discount,” says Waterbury. “So that industry is plagued with incredibly high turnover in their sellers and it’s become a massive recruiting game.”

For consumers, the advantages of shopping with a Chloe & Isabel merchandiser include getting exclusive designs (the company does not purchase ‘open-line’ products from suppliers, meaning all jewelry is unique to the brand) and savings off retail prices because there is no middleman. Some sellers make almost all of their sales through their online boutiques, while others host Chloe & Isabel events that they promote through their social networks. 

“At the end of the day, I see it as an omni-channel approach: offline, online, social retail,” says Waterbury. “However you want to sell it, it can happen in any channel.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Material Wrld, the fashion startup seed funded by Warby Parker and Bonobos investor Great Oaks VC, is today making its public debut. The e-commerce site has come a long way since the beta it had running late last year, and to kick off its launch, the company is introducing a number of new features to help its fashion community discover new styles, ideas and people to follow.

The marketplace was founded by Rie Yano and Jie Zheng, who met while in grad school at Harvard. Both had worked in the fashion industry themselves – Yano in digital media marketing at Coach, and Zheng at Ralph Lauren and J Crew.

As the company name hints, the site plans to go after an international audience. And Yano tells us that currently, some 30 percent of the service’s traffic comes from outside the U.S., despite the Material Wrld’s still heavy New York focus.

“We’re aggressive about entering new markets,” explains Yano, “because at the end of the day, a marketplace is only exciting when it’s international. More than half of eBay sales are done internationally,” she adds. “From the beginning, our business model has been about allowing people to discover and purchase from anywhere in the world.”

The service is going after the high-end fashion consumer, allowing them to photograph and share the items in their closet, and then sell those items to other users in a peer-to-peer marketplace setting. It’s a concept that’s been tried before from startups like Poshmark, Threadflip, Twice, and even kids’ clothes marketplace like ThredUp. But Yano notes that Material Wrld isn’t going after “fast fashion,” as she calls it; it’s very brand and quality conscious. Price points for clothes on sites like Poshmark tend to fall in the $20 to $30 range, she remarks, while on Material Wrld, it’s much higher.

“We’re not disclosing our sales figures yet, but our average order price is around $100,” Yano says. “And we’re actually focused on bringing that average order price up. We’re differentiating ourselves from the rest of the resale space, which is much more like ‘thrifting’ than ‘luxury consigning,’”

With today’s official debut, the site is offering its early adopters half a dozen new features, including real-time notifications of site activity, in a style similar to what you would see on Facebook, a personalized “live feed” of the closets and groups you’re following, also reminiscent of Facebook’s News Feed, and more.

A “Style Groups” section, meanwhile, is more inspired by Meetup.com, as it also allows for a group creator to serve as admin to a variety of groups like “fashion bloggers,” “artists,” “Lucky Magazine,” “We work in fashion,” “OOTD Mag,” and others. Though anyone can follow the group’s output, membership is controlled and entrants have to answer a trio of questions, similar in style to those asked when applying for membership to closed groups on Meetup.

Some of these groups are already crossing over into the offline world as well – for instance, Material Wrld is hosting a “re-closet” party at the Steven Alan Tribeca showroom in New York in April.

With the new site, buyers and sellers are gaining better tools, too, including seller reviews, person-to-person messaging, and a pricing database that helps sellers’ determine their items’ worth. Fashion shoppers can play with “closet roulette” on the homepage – a discovery feature that lets you click to circle through users’ shared, shoppable items.

Yano says more is to come in the near future, including for example, filtering the “item feed” by type (shirts, skirts, shoes, etc.), as well as a new “make an offer” option, which will arrive in a week or so. This latter feature will allow buyers to ask to purchase showcased items from others’ closets which are not explicitly marked for sale.

“The reason why we’re doing the showcase is that we know for a lot of people, there’s a time gap between loving what you’ve purchased and that item just hanging in your closet, with you not even realizing that this could be sold,” Yano explains.

During its beta, Material Wrld has seen over 100,000 visitors, 10,000 of whom registered for accounts. After hand-curating who could then sell their items, the site ended up with 300 closets (sellers) on board. The next steps, now that it’s officially “open” to the public is a focus on user growth, Yano tells us. Given that the service will monetize via a 15 percent transaction fee on sales, this part is mission critical.

Over the course of the year, Material Wrld will also debut on mobile, and launch internationally. Japan will be the first overseas market targeted, we hear.

Today, however, the startup takes its first steps with the newly relaunched site. Interested users can join Material Wrld here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Zalora, a Singaporean fashion and beauty e-tailer backed by Rocket Internet, has scooped up €20 million (about $26 million USD) from German retail conglomerate Tengelmann Group, just six months after it landed an undisclosed sum from JP Morgan. In addition, Zalora told us it has also started building a regional software development center in Singapore to develop its Web platform, as well as mobile apps.

Tengelmann has already invested in several other Rocket Internet interests. Last month, Linio, the so-called ‘Amazon of Latin America,’ reportedly raised about €15-20m range from the German company. In January, online marketplace Lazada, another Southeast Asia e-commerce site, announced that it picked up a round of strategic funding from Tengelmann. Sources close to that deal told TechCrunch that it was worth close to $20 million.

Zalora currently operates in Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as across Southeast Asia in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. Since its launch early last year, the e-commerce site says it has achieved “annualized double-digit million” revenues and now employs more than 1,000 people. As Rocket Internet expands their fashion business to more markets with Zalora and other investments, they can become a stronger buyer, cutting costs and improving margins. Rocket Internet’s relationship with Tengelmann, which has more than 4,000 stores across 15 different countries and annual revenues of over €10 billion, can help it become a more important player in retail.

Zalora not only represents more build-up in developing markets for the Samwer brothers, but with its software innovation center, investing in the Singaporean retailer may also be an attempt by controversial Berlin-based incubator to show that it can innovate in addition to cloning successful business models–though that may be more of a PR move than anything (Linio is an Amazon clone, while Payleven is a duplicate of Square, and Zalora is often referred to as ‘the Zappos of Asia.’

But innovation aside, Rocket is still building out e-commerce companies in emerging markets that are attracting hundreds of millions in investment dollars. The Singaporean site’s other investors include JP Morgan–which, like Tengelmann, is also a repeat investor in Rocket Internet-backed companies. The company did not officially disclose the terms of the funding it received from JP Morgan in September, as is usual for investments in Rocket Internet companies, but Zalora told us that the value was in the “significant double digit millions” of dollars. Last fall’s deal was the seventh investment made in a Rocket Internet company by JP Morgan in the space of just a month.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Back in November, we wrote that Rent The Runway, a Netflix for designer clothes, accessories and jewelry, had raised $20 million in funding led by Condé Nast Publications, with Bain Capital Ventures, Highland Capital Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers participating. The company is announcing an additional $4.4 million in new funding from new investor American Express and Novel TMT Ventures. This brings the company’s total funding to $54 million.

Rent The Runway allows women to rent designer clothes and accessories at a marked down price. Once you pick a design on the site that you’d like to wear, you can schedule a delivery date. Rent The Runway will send two sizes, to ensure that you receive a dress that fits. Rentals on the site run from $50 to $200 for a four night loan, or 10% of the retail price.

The startup has over 3 million members and 170 designer brands, and recently introduced the first-ever online social shopping platform – Our Runway – which allows women to shop based on user-generated photos of real women with similar body types. The flagship feature of the launch is a Find Women Like Me tool, which allows women to enter their height, bust size, dress size and age, in order to view thousands of diverse women with comparable shapes in dresses available for rent.

CEO and co-founder Jennifer Hyman tells us that the new funding made sense from both a strategic point of view and also from a financial perpective. The funding will be used to hire key executives within the company, in addition to backing marketing and inventory investments.

Ed Gilligan, Vice Chairman of American Express commented in a release, “American Express is committed to being an enabler of commerce, and we recognize that Rent the Runway is delivering a creative commerce solution to a consumer need in a way that’s simple, seamless and scalable.”

Novel TMT Ventures investments include Warby Parker, Business of Fashion, Moda Operandi, Dailylook, Context Logic, Playspan, Facebook, Delivery Hero and Skrill.

Hyman adds that the company is also exploring the possibility of expanding offline retail offerings, and pop up shops.

Conde Nast has been doubling down on the fashion and e-commerce investments of late. The publishing giant backed Farfetch, a London-based online marketplace for independent boutiques. There are all sorts of cross-marketing partnerships that Rent The Runway and Conde Nast could work together on when it comes to fashion and lifestyle. Back in November, Hyman has explained that that Rent The Runway provides broader access to the aspirational luxury fashion that the publishing house promotes via its flagship titles, like Vogue and Lucky.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch