The company plans use the funds raised to attain leadership in smartwatches, scale its business across channels and geographies (including outside India) and strengthen its category leadership in audio.
New Delhi: Leading audio and wearables brand boAt has raised Rs 500 crore and the New Delhi company plans use the funds to fuel expansion across categories, the company said in a press release on Friday.
Even though the company has not specified at what valuations the latest round of funding is raised, a person familiar with the company said boAt is currently valued at about $1.4 billion.
boAT’s parent company Imagine Marketing has raised the funds from its existing shareholder, an affiliate of Warburg Pincus and the new investor Malabar Investments. The investment will enable the company to accelerate its plans to attain leadership in smartwatches category, scale up its business across channels and geographies (including outside India) and strengthen its category leadership in audio.
“We are very excited about the potential of smartwatches. The market today is in the early stages of evolution and most players don’t have control over the end-to-end stack to offer compelling features to consumers. There is a significant opportunity to build the category and launch more distinctive and technologically advanced products,” Sameer Mehta, Co-founder & Chief Product Officer, boAt said.
“Through boAt labs (our 120-person in-house R&D team) and our acquisition of KaHa Technologies, (a wearables technology and IoT platform, with 64 patents and patent applications), we are developing the next generation of products. These products will provide richer features and deeper insights to consumers on their health and wellness to enable them to lead more active and fulfilling lifestyles,” Mehta added.
Speaking about its plans and the funding Aman Gupta, Co-founder & Chief Marketing Officer, of boAt said, “We have established clear leadership in our core personal audio category and are the number two player globally in ear wear. We now want to make smartwatches our second core and will replicate the boAt digital playbook to become global leaders in this category as well.”
He added that “the new funding will allow us to invest significantly to disrupt the smart watches space with more innovative products.”
Recently, the company has roped in Gaurav Nayyar as Chief Operating Officer to spearhead the operations and scale up the company.
