Online French fashion shop Rad expands in Europe

Rad, which is a French dicovery platform for fashion, art and design products, has raised 2,5 million euros in funding. They received this amount of money in a Series A investment round led by Index Ventures. With the investment Rad likes to expand its site to the United Kingdom and Germany.

Rad is just almost one year old, as it started in July last year, but it already has more than 1 million users. Now it has had its first raised money and with this it wants to go cross border. First to the United Kingdom and Germany and maybe in a year or two even to the United States. The money will be used to invest in logistics, production and marketing so the rollout in these two markets can be prepared.

The investment round was led by Index Ventures, which also backed other ecommerce companies like ASOS and Etsy. With the millions of euros Rad also plans to expand it current team. Co-founder David Smadja thinks the investment will help them on their way to developing their brand. “Our goal is for our members to create products with us on a massive scale, turning Rad into an incubator for young talent and designers.”

By the way, it’s kind of fun to read how Martin Mignot, the partner at Index who led the investments, got to the decision to invest in Rad. On his personal blog he tells how he took some time to think about the sectors he wanted to invest in this year and that ecommerce was low on his list. Until his girlfriend, an avid fashion shopper, tipped the French website Rad!

Professionally, there are two reasons for Mignot why he wanted to invest in the company: they have the fastest team he has ever met and he thinks it’s a brand that clicks (Rad reached 200,000 members without spending even a single euro in marketing).