Lifestyle, mobility brand Ninety One raises Rs 225 cr in Series A round

Active lifestyle and sustainable mobility brand, Ninety One, today announced raising of Series A funding of Rs 225 crore, which includes Rs 160 crore from A91 Partners LLP and Rs 65 crore from Fireside Ventures, Avaana Capital and Titan Capital.

Following the capital injection, Ninety One, from AlphaVector (India), is now valued at Rs 1000 crore. It has over 20,000 bicycles sales per month, presence across 1,000 retail points in over 500 cities and a million monthly unique visitors to its site www.outdoors91.com.

Ninety One will use the new funding of $30 million to invest in manufacturing facilities in Gujarat, build its electric cycles portfolio and expand into global markets. The Series A funding also sees A91 Partners’ VT Bharadwaj, Fireside Venture’s Vinay Singh and Avaana Capital’s Sandeep Singhal join the Board of Directors.

“At Ninety One, our focus has always been on disrupting the bicycle and electric cycles category through engineering led product innovation and a deep brand connect with our consumers. The current funding round will help us catalyse growth multi-fold as we use the capital to deepen our supply chain, strengthen our distribution channels and build our brand story,” said Sachin Chopra, co-founder and CEO, Ninety One.

“Our products resonate with the aspirations of India’s millennials and Gen-Z, and the funding will help us consolidate our presence in this space by enhancing our D2C connect with consumers across India. We will invest in our omni-channel capabilities by making it seamless for our consumers to discover, consider and purchase Ninety One products across our digital (website and marketplaces) and offline channels.  We will also be investing in our WYND social fitness app and Hub91 mobile based ERP,” said Vishal Chopra, co-founder and head of Digital, Ninety One.

VT Bharadwaj, general partner, A91 Partners LLC said, “We are excited to back Ninety One as a pioneering new age Indian active lifestyle brand that can truly deliver world class products to global consumers. Ninety One has out innovated competition in bicycles and electric cycles and emerged as a strong brand with deep distribution backed by solid manufacturing capabilities. We believe Sachin and Vishal will capitalize on this success in multiple categories and markets going ahead.”

Founded in 2015, Ninety One has delivered over 5X MRR growth while addressing only 50% of its target audience market, said the company’s statement. Currently, Ninety One sells 20,000+ bikes per month across its omni channel distribution network with 80%+ of its sales coming from the men category. As Ninety One increases its research and engineering focus on the kids and women category through innovative product launches, it expects these categories to contribute 50% of its sales over the next two years.