Abhishek Shah, co-founder and CEO of Fetise, an invitation based online retailer of fashion apparel for men and a few others including other co-founders have left the company as it struggles to fund its operations. Shah’s exit was first reported by Medianama.
NextBigWhat has learned that the company is now down to less than 10 employees and is undergoing a management change. The company founded in 2011, was backed by Mumbai based Seedfund. Mahesh Murthy, a Co-Founder at Seedfund confirmed Shah’s exit from the company and said,“There is a smooth transition underway at Fetise.”.
We tried reaching out to Shah for more details, but haven’t heard from him so far. Shah is said to be starting up a new venture.
Seedfund had promised to invest $5 million in the ecommerce company. Sources said that Fetise was running out of cash fast and was cutting down on inventory over the last couple of months. Where there used to be thousands of products, only a few hundreds are left now. Just over a 100 products are listed in its clothing category and only 22 products are listed in its accessories section.
Murthy declined to disclose Seedfund’s exact investment in the company.
To scale and operate for much longer, Fetise would need more cash which it doesn’t have at the moment, said a source familiar with the company. We asked Murthy if Fetise was going to be shut, like many other e-commerce companies recently. Murthy said that the site is doing fine and consumers “continue to throng.”
The Delhi based company was started in March 2011 by Chetan Bafna, Abhishek Shah, Somya Tambi and Subir Ghosh.
Given the difficult environment for e commerce companies looking to raise follow on funding, it would be interesting to see how Fetise pulls through.
What are your thoughts?
