Zovi raises US$ 10m from SAIF and Tiger Global; Acquires Inkfruit

Two of the leading players in the e-commerce space, Zovi and Inkfruit today announced the closing of a merger between them. This merger will bring together India’s 2 leading online fashion private label brands. In addition to this, Zovi today also announced their 3rd big round of funding wherein it raised $10m from two of its lead investors, SAIF Partners and Tiger Global. This round brings the total funding raised in Zovi to $25m and is strong evidence of the investor’s belief in the market opportunity and the Zovi team.

A recent report by Google estimates that on 2013, apparel and accessories will become the largest consumer interest category for Indian online shoppers. This merger between Zovi and Inkfruit has been driven by a great opportunity that the rapidly emerging ecommerce market in India presents.

Manish Chopra, CEO, Zovi,said, “This merger creates the country’s strongest private label online fashion company. We look forward to blending together with the Inkfruit team and leveraging their unique design and creative capabilities. Our vision continues to be very clear – Simplifying fashion, online! Zovi was born with a core proposition to locally design and manufacture high-quality lifestyle apparel and accessory products and to offer them online at extremely reasonable prices. The combined team will continue to power ahead towards this vision. We welcome the Inkfruit team onboard”.

Kashyap Dalal, CEO, Inkfruit, said, “We are excited by the opportunity to integrate the businessesand leverage complementary team strengths, product lines and customer bases to scale rapidly. We look forward to working as one team and build one of the largest e-commerce businesses over the next few years.”

The combined entity will operate out of two centres, Bangalore and Gurgaon with a satellite office in Mumbai to support the regional sourcing and logistics functions.
Zovi.com will use the funds for its growth initiatives, marketing campaigns and launching new categories. The funds and the merger will facilitate accelerating its growth in existing categories and expanding logistics to build its self- delivery network to cover more than 75% of total shipments.