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Gurugram-headquartered business-to-business manufacturing platform for apparel, Zyod, has raised $18 million in a Series A round of funding in a mix of debt and equity investment. The round led by RTP Globalalso saw participation from returning investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Alteria Capital.

Other investors in the round include Stride Ventures, Stride One, and Trifecta Capital. 

The company will use the capital for geographical expansion to 40 new countries. At present it works with fashion apparel brands across 18 countries. Part of the capital will also be used for technological advancements and talent acquisition.

Founded in April 2023 by Ankit Jaipuria and Ritesh Khandelwal, ZYOD had last raised $3.5 million in a seed round led by Lightspeed in 2023. The company takes care of end-to-end manufacturing of apparel including design, manufacturing and delivery for apparel brands. In India, it works with the likes of Reliance, Aditya Birla, Rare Rabbit, FirstCry and others. 

“I did not know earlier that from design to delivery it takes fashion houses six months to get the new designs for each season. Post Covid, the number of seasonal launches has increased,” Ankit Jaipuria, Co-founder at ZYOD told YourStory. 

While Jaipuria’s family has been in the textile business in Jaipur, the IIT Delhi graduate has also worked briefly with Accel and Prosus-backed Fashinza which was addressing a similar problem statement. However, Fashinza said it would return investor capital earlier this year as the company could not find a product-market fit, according to reports. 

“We took a three-pronged approach to working with apparel brands – we promised end-to-end design and delivery, faster turn-around time and lower Minimum Order Quantity (MOQ) for manufacturing,” Jaipuria told YourStory. 

He added that from a turnaround time of 6 months and MOQ of nearly 25,000 pieces on average per season, it offers its customers a turnaround time of 40-60 days with as low as 200 pieces.

“We have digitised the combination of patterns which can be mixed and matched. This ultimately reduces fabric wastage, and solves the problem of dead inventory for the brands,” added Jaipuria. The company also plans on digitising the supply chain. 

While ZYOD has a presence in the manufacturing clusters of Jaipur, Delhi-NCR, Ludhiana and Thiruppur, it is evaluating other markets. 

“ZYOD leverages tech to refine every facet of the production process, right from a modular design approach to optimising operations at the factory level. We are excited to support ZYOD as they expand their transformative platform internationally, showcasing the potential of Indian entrepreneurship on the global stage,” NishitGarg, Partner at RTP Global’s Asia investment team said in a statement. 

ZYOD competes in a market that has seen well-funded players like Fashinza which had raised a total of $75 million from marquee investors, as well as Tiger Global-backed GenieMode.