Startup Deep Dive : Zyod — two former Fashinza employees built a rival that raised $21.5 million in two years

Ankit Jaipuria and Ritesh Khandelwal did not start Zyod with an original idea. Jaipuria spent early 2021 inside the founder’s office of Fashinza, one of India’s best-funded fashion-manufacturing platforms, before deciding the model could be built leaner and faster from scratch. By the year ending March 2025, the company he and Khandelwal built to prove that point was, per the Registrar of Companies’ own filings, generating revenue of Rs 88.8 crore ($9.3 million at $1≈Rs 96.0, 18 September 2026, Trading Economics) — up from Rs 31.2 crore the year before.

That is one telling of Zyod’s numbers. The company itself, in an interview with Inc42 published in June 2025, described FY25 revenue very differently — as around $20 million, or roughly Rs 171 crore by its own unaudited reckoning, nearly four times what it said it made in FY24. The two accounts do not reconcile, and this piece names both rather than picking one. What both agree on is the direction: an apparel-manufacturing company that did not legally exist until 10 January 2023 was, within about two and a half years, doing business at a scale that takes most Indian garment exporters a decade to reach.

Quick facts

What Zyod does

Zyod is a business-to-business platform that takes over apparel manufacturing end to end for fashion brands — design support, fabric and trim sourcing, factory production, quality checks and delivery — instead of brands sourcing each of those steps separately through agents and mills. Its customers range from small direct-to-consumer labels placing orders of a few dozen pieces to large retail groups, and its India-registered classification (NIC code for manufacture of wearing apparel) reflects that it is built as a manufacturer with its own production capacity, not only a sourcing marketplace that connects two sides and steps back. It runs two company-owned-and-operated production hubs, in Gurugram and Jaipur, that sit on top of a wider network of partner factories across north Indian textile clusters, and it says it releases more than 10,000 new garment styles into its catalogue every month, up from single digits at launch (Inc42, 21 June 2025; Forbes India, 29 October 2025).

The origin

Ankit Jaipuria comes from a family that has been in the fashion trade for two generations, which gave him an early, personal view of how much a factory floor loses to inefficiency, unsold inventory and rigid minimum order sizes (Entrepreneur India, 17 March 2025). He trained as a mechanical engineer at IIT Delhi and worked as a consultant at Booz and Company and later at upGrad before moving into fashion manufacturing (Entrepreneurs Today, 25 January 2023). Between February and May 2021 he worked inside the founder’s office at Fashinza, a fashion-manufacturing platform that is now one of Zyod’s largest funded competitors — an experience both founders have credited with showing them where the model’s gaps were (Entrepreneur India, 17 March 2025). Jaipuria has said he was also studying how Shein ran its supply chain and asking why India could not build something comparably efficient (Entrepreneur India, 17 March 2025). Ritesh Khandelwal, an IIM Kashipur graduate, joined him as co-founder (Inc42, 21 June 2025).

The two did not go straight to institutional investors with a pitch deck. They first built and ran uKom, a B2B apparel-sourcing platform, from January 2022 — before Zyod existed as a company at all. uKom compressed design-to-launch timelines from roughly six months to about three weeks, cut minimum order quantities from an industry-standard 2,000-plus pieces to as few as 50, and, within its first year, had worked with more than 80 brands across five countries and three continents, supporting more than 20 SME manufacturers in India and helping the brands it served grow revenue by roughly 30% on average (Entrepreneurs Today, 25 January 2023). It was this working, revenue-generating prototype — not a slide deck — that Jaipuria and Khandelwal used to formally incorporate Zyod Commerce Private Limited on 10 January 2023 and then raise their first institutional round three months later.

The struggle years

Zyod’s public record does not include a dramatic near-collapse, and this piece will not manufacture one where the sources do not support it. What it does show, consistently across founder interviews, are two structural problems that the founders had to solve before the business could scale, and that remain live operating risks rather than solved-and-forgotten history.

The first was capital intensity. A manufacturing platform has to pay factories, fabric mills and labour well before its brand customers settle their own invoices, which means growth eats cash in a way a pure software marketplace does not. Zyod’s own funding history reflects this: when it closed its Series A in June 2024, a large part of the $18 million raised was structured as debt rather than equity, specifically earmarked to fund working capital rather than technology or headcount (TechCrunch, 24 June 2024). Raising debt this early, alongside equity, is itself evidence of how much cash the manufacturing side of the business consumes before it converts to revenue.

The second was quality control across a network the company does not fully own. Because most of Zyod’s production runs through partner factories rather than its own two hubs, consistency depends on how well those third-party units adopt its technology and processes. Forbes India’s October 2025 account of the business explicitly names this as a challenge that “will multiply” as Zyod adds more factories and higher volumes, alongside the related problem that demand in fast fashion is sporadic — meaning factory labour does not always have steady work, a structural issue for manufacturing partners even when Zyod itself is growing (Forbes India, 29 October 2025).

The turning point

If there is a single hinge event in Zyod’s short history, it is the close of its Series A round on 24 June 2024. Before that round, the company had raised only its $3.5 million seed (April 2023), was working with roughly 150 clients across 13 countries at the time that seed was announced, and was still primarily a India-facing sourcing story (TechCrunch, 3 April 2023). After the round — $18 million in a mix of equity and debt, led by RTP Global with Lightspeed Venture Partners and Alteria Capital returning and Stride Ventures, StrideOne and Trifecta Capital joining fresh — the company said it was already operating in 18 countries and set an explicit target of expanding to more than 40, including Brazil, Australia and Scandinavian markets, while RTP Global’s own announcement of the deal said the company expected 80% of its future revenue to come from outside India (TechCrunch, 24 June 2024; RTP Global, June 2024). The revenue trajectory on either side of that raise tells the same story in numbers: Rs 31.2 crore in the fiscal year that closed two months after the seed extended into scale-up mode, and Rs 88.8 crore in the fiscal year that followed the Series A close, per the RoC-linked estimate (Tofler, accessed September 2026; Inc42 company database, accessed September 2026).

The money behind it

• Seed round, April 2023: $3.5 million (~Rs 33.6 crore), led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with FJ Labs and Panthera Peak Capital, plus angel investors including Tracxn co-founder Abhishek Goyal and OYO’s then global COO Abhinav Sinha (TechCrunch, 3 April 2023).
• Series A, announced 24 June 2024: $18 million (~Rs 172.8 crore) in a mix of equity and debt, led by RTP Global; returning backers Lightspeed and Alteria Capital; new participants Stride Ventures, StrideOne and Trifecta Capital (TechCrunch, 24 June 2024; mediabrief, 19 June 2024).
• Total disclosed raise: $21.5 million (~Rs 206 crore) across the two announced rounds, per Inc42’s company database (accessed September 2026).
• A further, unconfirmed tranche: Tracxn’s funding record shows an additional Series A close dated 27 February 2026, again led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with the amount marked undisclosed on the public page (Tracxn, accessed September 2026). Zyod has not put out its own announcement of this round as of this writing, so the figure is flagged here as reported by a single data provider rather than confirmed.
• Valuation: not disclosed by the company at any round. YourStory’s coverage of the Series A said only that the valuation had grown “multi-fold” since the seed round, without naming a number (YourStory, June 2024) — a claim this piece cannot independently verify with a second source, so no valuation figure is stated.
• Cap table: founders hold 46.31%, institutional funds 42.32%, the ESOP pool 10.95% and angel investors the remaining 0.43% (Tracxn, accessed September 2026).

How it makes money

Zyod is registered and structured as a manufacturer, not a pure marketplace that simply connects a brand to a factory and takes a cut of the transaction. That distinction matters because it is the part outsiders most often get wrong: Zyod owns two production hubs itself and runs a proprietary ERP and design-technology stack that it also licenses to the partner factories in its network, rather than earning only a brokerage-style commission (TechCrunch, 3 April 2023; Inc42, 21 June 2025).

• Manufacturing revenue: the company earns on the apparel it produces and delivers for brands — design, sourcing, production and logistics bundled into one order — rather than charging a separate line-item fee for each service.
• Technology layer sold into the factory network: Zyod’s AI-assisted design and production-tracking software is deployed inside partner factories to standardise output and give real-time visibility into a production line’s progress (TechCrunch, 3 April 2023).
• Lower minimum order quantities as a paid-for feature: where a typical Indian garment factory wants a minimum order of roughly 2,000 pieces per style, Zyod has taken orders as small as 50 to 200 pieces, letting it serve younger D2C brands that larger manufacturers turn away — effectively charging for flexibility that incumbents do not offer (TechCrunch, 3 April 2023; imagesbof, 16 May 2025).
• Speed as the other lever: the company has said production cycles that once took 120 to 180 days at a traditional factory can run in roughly 45 to 50 days on its platform, which lets brand customers hold less inventory and react faster to a trend — the value proposition it charges a premium for (Inc42, 21 June 2025).
• No published take rate: unlike a commission marketplace, Zyod does not publish a percentage fee or take rate, and none of the sources reviewed for this piece disclose one; that figure is cut here rather than estimated.

The numbers

Zyod is only a little over two and a half years old as a registered company, so a long revenue history does not yet exist; FY24 is its first full financial year with filed accounts. The table below uses the RoC-linked figures, which is the more conservative of the two available accounts of FY25 (see note below).

Sources: FY24 revenue of Rs 31.2 crore is corroborated independently by two sources — startup-data platform Tofler/InstaFinancials (accessed September 2026) and Forbes India’s own reporting of the same figure for “March 2024” (Forbes India, 29 October 2025). FY25 revenue of Rs 88.8 crore comes from Inc42’s company database (accessed September 2026), and sits inside the broader Rs 50-100 crore band that Tracxn separately estimates for the same year (Tracxn, accessed September 2026). Set against this, Inc42’s own editorial team reported a company-stated figure of “multi-million dollars,” specifically around $20 million (roughly Rs 171 crore, unaudited) for FY25, on a stated FY24 base of about $5 million (roughly Rs 42.8 crore) — a fourfold increase by the company’s own account (Inc42, 21 June 2025). The RoC-linked figures and the company-stated figures do not match on either year; both are recorded here because they come from sources this piece actually opened, and no attempt is made to force them into agreement. Profit or loss has not been made public in any source reviewed for this piece, including paywalled financial trackers whose free previews stop short of net income.

Where the money comes from

• By customer type: more than 500 small and medium manufacturing enterprises integrated into its supply network (Inc42, 21 June 2025; mediabrief, 19 June 2024 — both cite “over 500 SMEs”), alongside a company-stated customer base of 550-plus D2C brands and 50-plus larger, established brands (Inc42, 21 June 2025, single-sourced).
• By geography: roughly 150 clients across 13 countries at the April 2023 seed stage; about 18 countries by the June 2024 Series A; an explicit target of 40-plus countries including Brazil, Australia and Scandinavian markets funded by that round (TechCrunch, 3 April 2023 and 24 June 2024). RTP Global’s investor announcement said the company expected 80% of future revenue to come from outside India (RTP Global, June 2024).
• Named clients corroborated by more than one source: Reliance Retail, Landmark Group, NEXT, Anthropologie, FirstCry, Rare Rabbit and Aditya Birla Group companies (Inc42, 21 June 2025; imagesbof, 16 May 2025; mediabrief, 19 June 2024; RTP Global, June 2024).
• By manufacturing footprint: two company-owned-and-operated hubs, in Gurugram and Jaipur, that oversee a wider network of partner factories concentrated in north Indian textile clusters (Forbes India, 29 October 2025; Inc42, 21 June 2025).
• The surprise: despite being an India-manufacturing story, the company’s own stated ambition is for the large majority of its revenue to eventually come from brands outside India, which would make Zyod less a domestic apparel platform and more an export-manufacturing operation that happens to be headquartered in Gurugram (RTP Global, June 2024).

The risks

• Working-capital dependence: because Zyod pays factories and mills before its brand customers settle invoices, growth requires cash upfront; the company addressed this by raising part of its Series A as debt specifically for working capital rather than equity for growth spend, which raises its exposure to interest costs and repayment schedules if customer collections slow (TechCrunch, 24 June 2024).
• Quality consistency across a partner-factory network it does not fully own: most volume runs through third-party factories rather than Zyod’s own two hubs, so output quality depends on how well those independent units adopt its technology and standards as the network and order volumes grow (Forbes India, 29 October 2025).
• Demand volatility in fast fashion: production is tied to trend cycles that can shift quickly, and Forbes India’s reporting notes this leaves manufacturing labour with inconsistent work even when the platform overall is growing — a structural risk to factory-partner reliability that is specific to the fast-fashion model Zyod has built around (Forbes India, 29 October 2025).

The takeaway

The most transferable lesson in Zyod’s story is not about technology or even about manufacturing. It is that Jaipuria and Khandelwal’s edge came from proximity, not originality: months spent inside a competitor’s founder’s office showed them exactly where an existing model was slow, rigid or expensive, and they built uKom, then Zyod, to remove those specific frictions rather than to invent an unrelated new category. They also did not ask institutional investors to fund an idea — they funded uKom’s growth themselves long enough to show more than 80 brands and roughly 30% average revenue gains before Lightspeed wrote the first institutional cheque. For a founder anywhere, the pattern is the same: working inside the industry you plan to compete in, and proving the fix on a small scale before asking anyone else to pay for it, is a more reliable path than a clean-sheet idea pitched cold.

Frequently asked questions

What does Zyod do?

Zyod is a business-to-business platform that manages apparel manufacturing end to end for fashion brands, covering design support, fabric sourcing, factory production and delivery, using its own production hubs in Gurugram and Jaipur alongside a wider network of partner factories.

Who founded Zyod and when?

Ankit Jaipuria and Ritesh Khandelwal founded Zyod. Their earlier venture, uKom, launched in January 2022, and Zyod Commerce Private Limited was formally incorporated on 10 January 2023 in Gurugram.

How much funding has Zyod raised?

Zyod has raised $21.5 million across two publicly announced rounds: a $3.5 million seed round in April 2023 led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, and an $18 million Series A (equity and debt) in June 2024 led by RTP Global. A further, unconfirmed funding event dated February 2026 appears in Tracxn’s records with its amount undisclosed.

Is Zyod profitable?

Zyod has not publicly disclosed a profit or loss figure for any fiscal year. Its revenue is reported to have grown from Rs 31.2 crore in FY24 to Rs 88.8 crore in FY25 on an RoC-linked basis, though the company has given trade press a higher, unaudited figure for FY25 revenue.

Who are Zyod’s main competitors?

Inc42 names Fashinza, Groyyo, ReshaMandi and Geniemode as Zyod’s key competitors in Indian B2B apparel manufacturing. Tracxn ranks Zyod second among 12 tracked competitors by its own methodology, behind more heavily funded rivals such as Fashinza.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ Rs 96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• TechCrunch, “Zyod raises $3.5M seed” (Cloth manufacturing), April 2023
• TechCrunch, “India’s Zyod raises $18M to expand its tech-enabled fashion manufacturing to more countries”, June 2024
• YourStory, “B2B apparel manufacturing platform ZYOD raises $18M”, June 2024
• RTP Global, “ZYOD Raises $18M to Power Global Fashion Sourcing”, June 2024
• mediabrief.com, “Exclusive: Ankit Jaipuria, Co-Founder of ZYOD”, June 2024
• Entrepreneurs Today, “Ankit Jaipuria Sets to Revolutionize the Indian Apparel Retail Market”, January 2023
• Inc42, “How ZYOD Is Powering A New Wave Of On-Demand Fashion Manufacturing”, June 2025
• Inc42, company database profile for Zyod (funding, revenue and employee tracker), accessed September 2026
• Forbes India, “Faster, leaner, smarter: How Zyod is changing garment manufacturing in India”, October 2025
• Entrepreneur India, “Entrepreneur India 35 Under 35 2025: Code Meets Couture”, March 2025
• Founder Thesis, “Unravelling the Threads | Ankit Jaipuria @ ZYOD”, February 2025
• Images Business of Fashion (imagesbof.in), “We are building railway tracks for fashion brands to run on: Ankit Jaipuria, Co-Founder, ZYOD”, May 2025
• Tofler / InstaFinancials, Zyod Commerce Private Limited corporate and financial record, accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, ZYOD company and funding profile, accessed September 2026

Found an error? Write to us and we’ll correct it in the open, dated, on the piece.