SoftBank Ventures Asia, a corporate venturing vehicle for telecommunications and internet firm SoftBank, has led a $15m series B round for Singapore-based women’s fashion rental service Style Theory, TechCrunch reported on Friday.
Industrial conglomerate Paradise Group of Industries also took part in the round, along with Southeast Asia-focused venture capital firm Alpha JWC Ventures.
Founded in 2016, Style Theory offers a choice from some 50,000 items of clothing and 2,000 handbags to consumers in Singapore and Indonesia, who access the service through a monthly subscription fee, pitching its business model toward the needs of female Southeast Asian consumers.
The company runs a physical store in Singapore and employs third-party retail partners to hold deliveries for customers with long working hours, offering multiple payment options to account for lesser credit card usage in the region.
A portion of the series B proceeds will be used to upgrade Style Theory’s supporting technology, which includes a bespoke warehouse-management system and machine learning algorithms used to personalise clothing recommendations.
Style Theory also hopes to introduce radio-frequency identification tagging for its inventory. It is preparing to launch more categories of clothing before potentially entering new geographical territories in 2020.
SoftBank Ventures Asia and Alpha JWC both contributed to a series A round for the company in late 2017, adding to a similarly undisclosed amount of seed funding supplied by Alpha JWC at an undisclosed date.