Hyderabad-based Palred Technologies has raised about Rs 22 crore in the latest round led by Florintree Advisors, controlled by Mathew Cyriac, former co-head of Blackstone’s private equity business in India, and his college mate Chidambaram Palaniappan.Palred, which is listed in both NSE and BSE will allot shares to investors on a preferential basis at Rs 145 a piece, diluting roughly about 15% of the equity. Ashish Dhawan, founder of Chrys Capital and an existing investor in the company for over 10 years, has made an additional investment in the round. K Madhavan, joint managing director of Star TV India, and Bharat Sheth, managing director at Great Eastern Shipping, have also participated in this round of funding.
Palred owns and operates LatestOne. com, a vertically integrated ecommerce company and India’s largest e-tailor of mobile accessories. The funds would be used for the general expansion of the ecommerce platform, its chairman Palem Shrikanth Reddy told ET.
“The funds would be used for additional fulfillment centres, brand building and inventory. We also need to invest more on creating our B2B ecommerce channel as it provides great potential for this niche vertical,” Reddy said.
LatestOne.com has a quarterly net revenue of Rs 12.5 crore with an investment of Rs 30 crore so far. The company could successfully reduce its ‘burn rate’ over the last couple of years, Reddy said. “We are expecting a gross margin of 15% for the fourth quarter of the fiscal. The overall burn rate is expected to go below 10% of net revenue,” he said.
Palred, formerly known as Four Soft, sold its logistics software business to a portfolio company of Francisco Partners in 2014. Promoters of Four Soft, including Shrikanth Reddy, a postgraduate from Stanford University who worked with Hewlett Packard and UPS, retained a small portion of the proceeds to build LatestOne.com.
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