Gurugram's Slayd Bags Pre-Seed Cash From ajvc To Fix Fashion Discovery

Slayd, a Gurugram based fashion discovery platform, has raised 1.5 crore rupees in a pre‑seed funding round led by ajvc, the early‑stage fund founded by Aviral Bhatnagar, valuing the company at approximately 16.66 crore rupees post‑money.

Slayd was founded in 2025 by IIT Roorkee alumni Sparsh Jain, Harsh Porwal and Kumar Prasang. The company was built around a specific frustration with how fragmented online fashion shopping in India has become, with more than 100,000 new apparel designs launching every month across hundreds of separate e‑commerce platforms and direct‑to‑consumer brands, leaving shoppers to manually check multiple sites just to understand what is actually trending at any given moment.

Slayd's platform addresses that fragmentation by aggregating fashion products from more than 300 marketplaces and D2C brands into a single discovery layer, adding roughly 100,000 new products every month to keep pace with how quickly India's apparel market itself is expanding. Rather than simply listing products as they appear, the platform runs each item through a proprietary model that evaluates it across more than eight signals to determine whether it is likely to become an emerging trend, a process the company says currently identifies more than 2,000 products as hotsellers at any given time. Products are further organised into theme‑based collections and personalised feeds, intended to let users discover items across multiple platforms without needing to visit each one individually.

Sparsh Jain has framed the company's positioning around that discovery gap directly, describing Slayd as building the discovery layer for a fashion market that remains structurally fragmented despite its scale, one where shoppers still have to do the work of navigating multiple platforms themselves to find what is genuinely worth buying. That framing treats Slayd less as another shopping app competing on price or selection and more as an aggregation and curation layer sitting on top of an e‑commerce ecosystem that already exists.

The platform has built meaningful early traction on that premise, crossing 200,000 users with month‑one retention above 40 percent, a relatively strong figure for a consumer discovery app operating in a crowded fashion e‑commerce market. The company has said its power users average more than 10 sessions a month, a level of repeat engagement that suggests the platform is functioning as an ongoing browsing habit for at least a segment of its user base rather than a one‑time discovery tool.

Alongside its core discovery product, Slayd has moved into private label retail through Slayd Originals, a brand launched in beta earlier this year that already generates around 1,000 orders a month according to the company. The strategic logic behind that move ties directly back to the data Slayd collects through its discovery platform, since the same trend detection signals used to surface hotsellers for shoppers browsing third party marketplaces can also be used internally to identify styles worth developing and manufacturing under Slayd's own label. Jain has described that data advantage as letting the company identify what shoppers want before building it, rather than manufacturing product first and hoping demand follows, a sequencing that private label fashion brands without a comparable discovery layer generally cannot replicate as directly.

The new pre‑seed capital will go toward expanding Slayd's team and scaling Slayd Originals specifically, according to the company, suggesting the private label business is viewed internally as a significant near‑term growth driver alongside continued growth of the core discovery platform. ajvc, the fund leading the round, has built a track record of backing early fashion and apparel focused startups in India, having previously led pre‑seed rounds for companies including Thread Factory, a B2B platform connecting independent apparel retailers with manufacturers, and Iztri, a clothing‑care network, giving the fund a reasonably specific view of where value is emerging across India's fragmented fashion supply chain and retail landscape.

Slayd enters a market where fashion discovery and personalisation have already drawn substantial investment globally, though the specific problem of aggregating discovery across hundreds of fragmented, India‑specific marketplaces and D2C brands remains comparatively underserved by larger, more generalist shopping platforms built primarily around a smaller number of major retailers. Whether Slayd's trend detection model can maintain accuracy as its product catalogue continues to grow at its current monthly pace, and whether its private label arm can scale profitably using data advantages built for browsing rather than manufacturing, will likely shape how much further capital the company is able to raise as it moves beyond this initial pre‑seed stage.