California: California based online shopping and fashion site Little Black Bag has secures $2.75 million in series A round of funding from GRP Partners, DCM, Chamath Palihapitiya, Tim Kendall, David Tisch, among others. The funds would be used to expand the company’s engineering team in Los Angeles and its buying and merchandising office in New York. The company would also be using the funds to expand the number of product categories and brands it carries.

“Given the uniqueness of the concept and the current excitement around social commerce, there was a lot of interest from venture funds.  The internet is a lonely place when it comes to ecommerce – and this gap has only gotten bigger as new social media sites like Pinterest, Path and others have emerged; where consumers are constantly interacting with others.  Investors have been making this point for a while now and we feel that our concept is the perfect starting point from which to build a truly interactive community around ecommerce, which is really the long term vision of Little Black Bag,” says Sasha Siddhartha, Co-Founder & CTO, Little Black Bag.

Little Black Bag was launched in January 2012 and is co-founded by Dan Murillo, David Weissman, and Siddhartha.  The company has 13 full time employees: 11 based out of Los Angeles and two based out of New York. Prior to co-founding Little Black Bag, Siddhartha was a Senior Engineering Manager at Microsoft. He holds a BS, Computer Science from Stanford.

The target customers for the company are 22-35 year old females, interested in fashion and are active online. “We are over-indexing on mobile, which is not surprising given how well the trading experience lends itself to mobile. The company helps customers find fashion products at affordable prices and have fun during the process. We are solving two types of problems for our customers: help them fashion products at affordable prices, and let them have fun. If you look at just the first problem, there are lots of competitors in the category, from traditional big box retailers like Macy’s to more specialized sites like ShopBop. What distinguishes us is that we are able to solve that problem for our customers, while simultaneously solving an entertainment problem.  This is a really unique value proposition and there are very few online retailers that are doing this well,” adds Siddhartha.

GRP Partners is a venture capital firm which is interested in financial services & technologies, consumer & retail innovation, digital media & performance-based marketing, SaaS & cloud infrastructure, and mobile application & infrastructure. Its portfolio investments include mongolab, factual, Datasift, TrueCar, Burstly,Citysearch, and PrePay among others.

DCM primarily invests in early-stage companies and selectively in strategic late-stage opportunities. Its  areas of interest include cleantech, components, social & gaming, communications & infrastructure, internet or digital media, and software and services. The company manages over $2 billion and its portfolio investments include Clearwire, eDreams, Force10 (acquired by Dell), Fortinet, 2Wire, About.com, SandForce, and Vimicro among others.