Online Eyewear Retailer Lenskart Nets $220M, Highlighting Tech Boom In India

Lenskart, which specializes as an online retailer for eyewear, has raised $220 million from investors, a LiveMint report says.

The India-based company has raised from investors like Temasek Holdings Pte and Falcon Edge Capital, the report says. The company’s valuation has now reached $2.5 billion.

The company, founded in 2010, sells things like eyeglasses, contact lenses and sunglasses, utilizing around 750 retailers.

With the new capital, Lenskart will add to the $95 million raised earlier in the year from KKR & Co. in order to boost online sales and add new brick-and-mortar stores in India, Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

“Every vertical from apparel to footwear, aside from eyewear, has been disrupted globally,” said Bansal, 37, on a video call announcing the funding. “We can easily spend two decades solving the problem of awareness, penetration and affordability in eyewear.”

According to the report, Lenskart sold around 8 million products last year. This year the company intends to grow that by around 30 percent.

With the combined market opportunity of its various markets, Lenskart says it may be worth as much as $15 billion by 2025.

Bansal said the idea behind the company came from the sheer amount of people in the area in need of glasses or other such eyewear — according to him, “about half” of the 1.5 million residents of India need glasses, and India is “the blind capital of the world.” Bansal said Lenskart has become profitable.

“We turned profitable at the company level before the pandemic, were in the red during the peak of the first and second waves and have returned to green again,” he said, according to the report.

Eyewear, as is the case with many other industries, has begun its shift to more digital places and has also expanded outward to new areas.

David Roger, co-founder & CEO of Felix Gray, told PYMNTS recently that his company is working on tapping into a market of individual wellness, including fighting the negative effects of looking at screens all day, which can disrupt sleep and have other negative effects.