Ghaziabad-based budget eyewear brand ClearDekho has raised funds from SOSV–MOX China Accelerator. This marks the global fund’s first investment in an Indian eyewear retail startup.
The funds raised will be used to capture and establish a presence in the untapped mass market in tier 2 and tier 3 cities across the country.
The funding comes months after the brand had raised ₹2 crores in pre-series A funding led by Venture Catalysts, along with participation from other investors including Windrose Capital, Samyakth Capital, among others.
Founded by Shivi Singh and Saurabh Dayal in 2016, ClearDekho provides an online and offline platform to offer a wide range of affordable eyewear products to its customers across India.
The platform provides various product categories including prescription eyeglasses, sunglasses, reading glasses, and branded contact lenses. It has opened 30 retail stores in Delhi, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan in the past 8 months and plans to expand to 100 stores by the end of this year.
ClearDekho has sold more than 100,000 eyeglasses and aims to provide budget eyewear solutions to people by offering quality products.
William Bao Bean, Partner SOSV & Managing Director MOX, said “Our platform has been dedicated to enable great ideas become scalable solutions impacting the community at large, we see ClearDekho as the perfect embodiment of that. We love the passion & expertise the team brings and are excited to see our partnership solve the problem of affordable, qualitative eyewear not just in India but to any consumer, the world over who needs it.”
SOSV, the Accelerator VC, is a $300M venture fund operating global accelerator programs: HAX (Shenzhen/San Francisco) for hardware, IndieBio (San Francisco) and RebelBio (Cork/London) for life sciences, Chinaccelerator (Shanghai) and MOX (Taipei) for cross-border internet, and FOOD-X (NYC) for the business of food.
MOX, the Mobile Only Accelerator, helps the best mobile startups from around the world acquire millions of users in Southeast Asia, India, Eastern Europe and South America. MOX brings free user acquisition to the 167 million users on its smartphone platform and investment in return for revenue share and equity.