Locofast raises $15 mn co-led by Stellaris Venture Partners, Chiratae Ventures

Infosys co-founder Kris (S) Gopalakrishnan’s fund, Axilor Ventures, also participated in the funding round, as well as angel investors including Suhail Sameer (CEO, BharatPe), Amit Lakhotia (founder and CEO, Park+), Nitin Gupta (founder and CEO, Uni).

The company has also raised debt from strategic partners such as Stride Ventures and BlackSoil Capital.

Locofast, a tech platform for textile procurement services, connects textile suppliers and vendors. The company saysit is streamlining “the currently broken supply chain by solving all textile procurement problems” and making it “smarter, efficient, and more transparent.”

Locofast has partnered with more than 500 suppliers, who have executed more than 5,000 textiles-related orders across the country.

“Most garment makers currently procure fabric from traders or small mills and are often short-changed on quality and delivery promise, leading to loss of business,” said Rahul Chowdhri, partner, Stellaris Venture Partners. “Locofast aggregates only high-quality mills on its platform and does quality checks before dispatching the order.”

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The company said it is involved in the supply chain of more than 700 brands in the apparel industry, including for Zara and H&M as well as TJX, Cotton:On and Primark.

Locofast was founded by Deepak Wadhwa and Mohit Piplani, who previously founded travel marketplace WeAreHolidays.

“Despite being a major contributor to India’s GDP, the textile industry is fragmented and slow in terms of technological adoption,” Wadhwa, also its CEO, said. “…our mission is to enable a sophisticated tech-enabled platform for textile SMEs and empower them with market linkages from across the world.”