Why Ratan Tata Invested His Money in Urban Ladder

The undisclosed investment of Ratan Tata, the chairman emeritus of Tata Group, in online furniture company Urban Ladder is due to his personal interest in furniture and his background in architecture, the company's chief operating office and co-founder Rajiv Srivatsa told NDTV.

"The fourth round (of funding) we are not divulging the exact details is where Mr Ratan Tata participated and you can see that he is very active in the e-commerce industry in India with multiple other investments and follows our company even closer because he has a big passion for furniture being an architect himself," Mr Srivatsa said.

Mr Tata holds a degree in architecture from Cornell University.

The India Inc veteran put in his personal money in the online furniture company in November last year. It was his second investment in the e-commerce space after Snapdeal. Earlier this month, Mr Tata invested in Paytm.

Urban Ladder was launched in July 2012 by co-founders Ashish Goel and Rajiv Srivatsa and offers over 1000 products across 25 categories in furniture such as wardrobes, beds, sofas, dining tables and coffee tables. It wants to take up the category count to 50, Mr Srivatsa said.

"Just around the time we started, we raised $1 million from Kalaari Capital (in2012). Kalaari is an investor with some of the biggest e-commerce companies including Snapdeal, Myntra, and Zivame," Urban Ladder said.

"The second round we had SAIF Partners who also participated with Kalaari and raised $5 million. SAIF Partners is one of the biggest success stories in Indian IPOs including makemytrip and Justdial, the third round saw Steadview Capital along with Kalaari and SAIF and Steadview has backed Olacabs and Flipkart and we raised around $20 million."

Urban Ladder plans to expand aggressively during the next year.

"In the next year we are looking at massive expansion across multiple cities. Today we are in 8 cities, we hope to get that to 30," Mr Srivatsa said.