Singapore beauty app Vanitee secures $3.5m

The round was led by entrepreneur Ivan Lee and Japanese beauty portal @cosme, who together committed S$3 million, according to a statement. Earlier this year Southeast Asia-focused beauty product distributor Luxasia and angel investor Robert Yap invested S$2 million.

The company will use the funds for regional expansion, with plans to enter Malaysia in the first quarter of 2016. It will also pursue strategic acquisitions and add more manpower to fuel faster growth.

Vanitee provides a forum for beauty service providers to advertise themselves and make bookings with customers. The aim is to cut out the middleman of the salon and allow customers to interact directly with the service providers. The company claims to have more than 550 independent beauty professionals signed up on its site, and to have served 5,000 customer since its launch in May.

Vanitee grew out of Vanity Trove, a beauty box service started by entrepreneur Douglas Gan in 2012 that delivered monthly packages of beauty products to users for a fixed fee. As beauty box services declined in popularity, Vanity Trove tried to reinvent itself as a beauty-focused social network, before relaunching itself as the "Airbnb of beauty services."

This year has seen a few deals in Southeast Asia's online beauty care start-up scene. In July luxury goods conglomerate LVMH bought Luxola, a Singapore-based cosmetics e-commerce start-up that last year raised $10 million from Transcosmos and Gree Ventures, while in October Gobi Partners led a $2 million Series A round for Malaysian cross-border online beauty product retailer Hermo.

• Tweet  
• Facebook  
• LinkedIn  
• Google plus  
• Save this article  
• Send to  

• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Consumer
• Technology
• Expansion
• Southeast Asia
• Singapore
• Consumer
• Technology
• TMT
• Growth capital