HBS alumni startup Hopscotch acquires online school supplies retailer, SkoolShop

Hopscotch is an online shop that stocks international brands of products for kids that was founded in October, 2012 by Harvard Business School alumni, Rahul Anand and Lisa Kennedy. The duo also worked together at the immensely successful Diapers.com. The company has recently acquired SkoolShop, an online school supplies retailer. SkoolShop operated in both the B2B and B2C domain and had also raised a funding round from Blume Ventures and other angels. The financials of the deal haven't been released but the investors in SkoolShop get an exit and the deal is an all-stock transaction.

Hopscotch itself raised $2 million earlier in the year from a group of investors, including Godrej family scion Nisaba Godrej, Singapore-based family office LionRock Capital, Skype co-founder Toivo Annus and Diapers.com co-founder and CTO Wei Yan. Hopscotch handpicks products from a list of 400+ international and domestic brands with a focus on what moms want. The company claims that it reaches more than one lakh moms on a daily basis and expects to do a business with revenues of INR 25 crores by 2015.SkoolShop is also a Mumbai based company founded by two HBS alumni, Satya Raghavan and Anusha Mahalingam. The SkoolShop website now redirects to Hopscotch and the merger means a much larger consumer base for Hopscotch along with more vendors onboard. When we last spoke to SkoolShop, they stocked more than 50,000 SKU’s which are sourced form over 300 vendors. Most of the products catered to kids but this acquisition will also mean sieving out the best categories and products to get on Hopscotch.

The online retail market (excluding travel) is pegged to be at $3 billion in India where Hopscotch faces tough competition from FirstCry and BabyOye. FirstCry raised $15 million earlier this year from Vertex Venture Management, a subsidiary of Singapore's staterun investment company Temasek Holdings. On the other hand BabyOye raised $12 million from Helion Venture Partners alongwith Accel Partners and Tiger Global. We decided to do a bit of a rank check and this how they match up in terms of Alexa: Hopscotch: 6626, BabyOye: 1091 and FirstCry: 539. Earlier, BabyOye had acquired Hoopos and from a broader perspective, this particular acquisition also is a sign towards consolidation in the category within eCommerce.

Website: Hopscotch