Fashion brand Zovi raises $50 million, to launch deals marketplace app

Zovi, a fashion brand with focus on men’s fashion, announced today (July 29) that they have raised $50 million and will launch Little, a diversification into the burgeoning Online to Offline (O2O) market. Founders Manish Chopra and Satish Mani  said that Little will be ‘app only’ and targets to be India’s largest consumer lifestyle deals marketplace. [caption id=“attachment_2370046” align=“alignleft” width=“380” class=" “]  Logo[/caption] The funding is led by Paytm along with a large new undisclosed investor and participation from existing investors SAIF Partners and Tiger Global Management. Little will use the funds to build the largest merchant ecosystem in the country, hire senior level talent and build new technology to focus on the Indian O2O market expected to be worth $64 billion by 2016. Little is building the largest O2O supply side infrastructure and will offer 50,000+ live deals across 11 cities by March 2016. The company is already 400 people strong with strengths in technology, product and operations and expects to build a 1000 person team by March 2016. The ‘Little’ app aims to be both a discovery platform for lifestyle consumers and a significant sales channel for merchants.  Little is on track to provide the largest supply of real-time hyper-local deals to customers across services like, restaurants, movies, hotels, salons, gyms, spas and other services while creating a hassle free, just in time platform for merchants to market their services. With the close partnership with Paytm, India’s largest mobile wallet player, Little will power the deals platform on Paytm and enable seamless payments when a customer bags a deal. Little has seen swift pickup amongst merchants and has already enrolled over 5,000 merchants in 11 cities across India, said founders Manish Chopra and Satish Mani. Little expects to hit a GMV run rate of $170 million, by March 2016. Ravi Adusumalli, Managing Partner of SAIF Partners said, “SAIF is excited to partner with the Little team as they create a game changing mobile marketplace for consumer deals. It’s been more than four years since we first incubated the team believing in technology and business acumen. We see enormous potential for O2O in India with the explosive smartphone growth and we believe that Little is uniquely positioned to become the clear leader in this space.”  “At Paytm, we are committed to build and partner every platform that will bring mobile commerce to masses in India,” said  Vijay Shekhar Sharma, CEO & Founder of Paytm, adding, “Little is one the key investments in that direction and will bring millions of hyper local deals to Paytm consumers right from their neighbourhood” Manish Chopra**,** CEO & Co-Founder of Little said**,** “We believe that the deals space is broken in India with little focus on personalization, timeliness and ease of redemption. With Little, we aim to change this by offering a real time, personalized and location-based marketplace which can offer contextual and purposeful deals as it learns one’s usage habits. Little’s differentiating strength and power will come from having the largest and deepest merchant base who see Little as their ‘sales partner’ for enabling them to get profits from selling their services. For merchants, Little will act as a personalised sales platform that they can use to gain intelligence about customers in the vicinity, ability to send timely notifications and offer relevant deals in a matter of seconds with just a few clicks.  We expect Little to become the de-facto ‘go-to’ mobile app for services hungry smartphone users in urban India.” Chopra and Mani will continue to build Zovi as a fashion brand with focus on men’s fashion. Zovi will be marketed on popular online market places and at Zovi.com.