Cloe (now Clovia), a first-of-its kind lingerie and women-wear brand with an online-first presence, has today announced that it has raised a fresh Series A round from Ivy Cap Ventures. The brand also announced renaming to Clovia, as a part of its global expansion strategy.
Founded by husband-wife duo Neha Kant & Pankaj Vermani along with friends Suman Choudhry and Aditya Chaturvedi in 2013, and incubated at Mountain Apollo India, Clovia, has been an early mover and one of the fastest growth stories in the online lingerie space.
Founders further tell us, that the current round will primarily be used for aggressively growing Clovia’s footprint globally, product innovation and extensions, marketing, team development and fulfillment capacity. The brand name change, will be effective immediately.
Kant further adds,
We have seen unprecedented growth in the lingerie and sleepwear segment in the last couple of years. In IvyCap Ventures, we have found a perfect partner to sustain the hockey stick growth curve, stick to the customer-first fundamentals and work faster towards becoming the #1 lingerie and sleepwear brand in India.
The founders’ logic behind coming up with an online fashion inner-wear brand in a market like India is pretty simple. For a country of 1.2Bn people, there’s hardly any choice when it comes to fashion inner-wear. More so, in a country where talking openly about women inner-wear is nothing short of a crime, coming up with Clovia will go a long way in resolving this orthodox viewpoint.
Fashionable lingerie and sleepwear e-Commerce is one of the fastest growing market segments within the larger apparel market in India. Clovia, with a head-start, boasts of one of the widest variety of designs across price points and quickest mind-to-market processes amongst similar players in the category, and significant repeat buying behavior.
Clovia’s growth numbers have been strong too. While the founders did not tell us the exact statistics or GMV, they claims to have achieved over 100% growth every quarter over the last year.
As a part of the deal, Vikram Gupta, Founder and Managing Partner at IvyCap will shortly be joining the board of Purple Panda Fashions Pvt. Ltd. (parent company for Clovia) on behalf of IvyCap Ventures.
