Online lingerie and sleepwear brand Clovia raises Series A fund from IvyCap Venture

Purple Panda Fashions Pvt. Ltd., which runs Clovia (formerly called Cloe), a leading online-first lingerie and sleepwear brand in India has raised Series A round of funding from IvyCap Ventures.

The funding will be utilized to expand footprint globally, product innovation and extensions, marketing, team development and fulfillment capacity.

As a part of their international expansion plans, the company also announced a change in their brand name from Cloe to Clovia, effective immediately. 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.

Speaking on the occasion of the announcement, Neha Kant, Founder, Clovia, said, “We have seen unprecedented growth in the lingerie and sleepwear segment in the last couple of years. For a country of 1.2bn people, there’s hardly any choice when it comes to fashion innerwear. The brand, launched primarily to cater to this need, has been growing at almost 100 per cent  every quarter over the last year. 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 No.1 lingerie and sleepwear brand in India.”
Neha further added, “The name change is part of a re-branding initiative to better align the company’s name with its future strategy and product roadmap.”

Fashionable lingerie and sleepwear e-Commerce is considered to be one of the fastest growing market segments within the larger apparel market in India. Clovia has taken an early head start in the space, carving for itself a strong brand position in the space in a short span of time since inception, through innovative and bold designs and affordable pricing. It 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.

“We strongly believe several niche e-Commerce verticals remain relatively untapped in India, and that players with high degree of control over the entire customer experience – in this case, right from sourcing of fabric, to manufacturing, to customization and recommendations based on deep understanding of the customer, to own-portal sales – will create the next wave of value creation in e-Commerce in the Indian context. Clovia has attracted our interest and capital, due to the founding team’s tremendous brand vision, ability to execute and control a fairly complex supply chain, that too in a non-trivial category – all of which is reflected in their incredible growth over the past 2 years, and a strong brand recall and repeat customer buying behaviour” said Vikram Gupta, Founder and Managing Partner of IvyCap Ventures. “In addition, we are also looking forward to adding significant value to Clovia through our network of relationships.”