Why we backed Whatmore

The company

Whatmore is the AI-powered shoppable-video and content-creation platform for direct-to-consumer brands. Eighty-plus paying brands use Whatmore today — including Aachho, Suta, Meera's Plus Size Store, and a long tail of mid-market Indian D2C operators selling fashion, lifestyle, beauty, and accessories.

The product is deceptively simple: it lets a D2C brand take the same Instagram-style video content their customers already expect on social media and embed it natively into the brand's own website, with in-video product tagging, swipe-and-shop interfaces, and automated checkout integration. The result is measurable: brands using Whatmore see roughly 3× the conversion rate, 1.5–2× the average order value, and 10× the return on ad spend versus their non-Whatmore traffic.

Why we backed them

When we first met Prabhu and Shyam in 2023, the conventional D2C wisdom was that performance marketing — Instagram and Meta paid acquisition — was the only growth lever that mattered. We saw something different: that the customer journey after the click was where the real margin lived, and that nobody had built modern video-commerce infrastructure for the long tail of D2C brands that couldn't afford to rebuild their stack from scratch.

Three things made us lean in.

First, the product was already working. Aachho was selling ₹40 lakhs of ethnic wear monthly through Whatmore at three times their site-wide conversion rate; Suta was using it to drive offline-event promotion. These were not hand-picked vanity case studies — these were real Indian D2C brands on the edge of profitability who had run rigorous A/B tests and decided Whatmore was now infrastructure they couldn't operate without.

Second, the wedge was right. Whatmore did not require brands to migrate platforms or rebuild their site. The integration goes live in ten minutes, sits across Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento, and pulls video automatically from the brand's existing Instagram. That meant the cost of switching to Whatmore was effectively zero — and the cost of leaving was the visible 3× conversion drop. That is the mathematics of a sticky product.

Third, the founders were operators. Prabhu and Shyam had spent years building D2C tooling before Whatmore. They understood the buyer's economics — the CAC compression, the AOV mathematics, the GMV pressure of every brand they sold to — and they had built a product that was directly priced against the value it created.

What we did beyond capital

After our pre-seed check, we worked alongside the team in three concrete ways.

We made introductions to D2C brand founders in our network — Indian-origin operators in fashion, beauty, and lifestyle who became early reference customers and, in some cases, paying customers. The Callapina diaspora circle opened doors that cold outbound never could.

We helped on the follow-on round. When Whatmore raised its next round, we made introductions to several India-corridor-focused funds and provided color on what proof points the syndicate would underwrite. The round closed faster than the founders had projected.

We worked on product positioning for the international expansion narrative. Whatmore's playbook in India is the foundation; the real prize is replicating it in Southeast Asia, the GCC, and the Indian-diaspora D2C market in the United States. We helped shape that narrative for investor and customer audiences alike.

The Callapina conviction

We back Whatmore because we believe the next five years of e-commerce will be defined by brands that move from static-page commerce to immersive-video commerce — and that the platform layer underneath that shift will be a meaningful business. Whatmore is positioned to be that platform for the long tail of brands the existing infrastructure giants cannot serve economically.

"Whatmore allows us to create engaging video experiences on our website that drive conversions and increase sales." — Aanchal Bhatia, COO, Meera's Plus Size Store

— Vinod Jose, Founding GP