SAIF Partners backed e-commerce players, Zovi and InkFruit announced the closing of a merger between them. As per the pact, InkFruit.com will cease to exist but its products and merchandise will be reatined on Zovi.com while on the management front, both Kashyap Dalal and Navneet Rai, co-founders of InkFruit, will join the board at Zovi.

In addition to this, Zovi has raised their third round of funding wherein it raised $10m from two of its lead investors, SAIF Partners and Tiger Global. With this, the total funding raised becomes $25m.

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, “We look forward to blending together with the InkFruit team and leveraging their unique design and creative capabilities. 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.

Headquartered in Bangalore, Zovi was launched in July 2011 while InkFruit started operations in 2008 as a crowd sourcing platform where artists from all over the world could contribute their creations and only the best would be curated by Inkfruit to feature on its product range.