Mathur says the company now wants to deepen the relationship that they have built between consumers and merchants, get more users to transact on the platform, and scale the number of users. He says users on their app use it almost three to five times a week, which the company wants to increase.

Over the years, the company has also built a community of people who share content and make recommendations on LBB. The company posts more than 300 featured recommendations on its platform every week, which are mostly user generated.

LBB launched commerce on the site about four months ago. Its shopping platform – LBB Shop, sells close to a 1,000 brands. Interestingly, Salwan says 95% of the brands are not listed on big e-commerce players such as Amazon and Flipkart.

“Our cart size has actually tripled in the past four months, the same consumer who used to come to us to read content is now getting comfortable in spending money through our platform as well,” Salwan says. She says the company’s focus is on small, local business or what she calls “unbranded brands”. LBB, Salwan says, gives them “brand cred (credibility)”.

A year ago, the company was also looking at international expansion. However that has been pushed by a year or two as it wants to focus on the Indian market.

“We are extremely bullish on the opportunity in India and we don’t own as much market share just yet... I think step one would be that whatever market we are in now, let’s just consolidate that and own that as much as possible before relentlessly expanding and then trying to cut out markets,” says Salwan.

The company, which reaches out to over 3 million users every month, connecting them to over 60,000 local brands and businesses, says it will expand its network to one or two more cities this year.

“What attracted us most to LBB is how they’ve made community a continued narrative in their promise to make local brands and businesses more accessible,” Rutvik Doshi, managing director, Inventus India, said in a statement.

LBB has raised a total of $7.5 million till date with this round. Japanese investors Dream Incubator and Akatsuki Entertainment Technology (AET) Fund, and existing investors Blume Ventures, and Chiratae Ventures also participated in the new funding round. Apart from institutional investors, they also have angel investors like Google India chief Rajan Anandan, who is set to join venture capital firm Sequoia Capital India as managing director after an eight-year stint with the search engine giant.

Little Black Book

LBB raises $5 million; to focus on existing market