As good as Elina Svitolina can be on the tennis court, the No. 7-ranked women’s player in the world isn’t immune to a fairly common issue that every athlete has dealt with at one point or another.
“We’re playing in hot conditions; your palms are sweating and sometimes the sweat is coming from your arms down to your grip.” Svitolina said in an interview. “When you play a forehand-backhand volley, it’s all different grips and you need to really be efficient with a quick turn of your racket.”
But last year, she was introduced to a hand grip gel from French startup company Tiva, and Svitolina has found her solution. Now, after integrating the product across her entire regimen, from practices to matches, she is taking her relationship with the brand a step further. The 31-year-old, who will be playing fellow Ukrainian Marta Kostyuk in the quarterfinals at the French Open, has joined Tiva as an ambassador and an investor.
“For me, right now I’m in the late stages of my career, so it’s important to find some projects that that I actually believe in,” Svitolina said.
Svitolina is part of a pre-seed funding round that saw Tiva raise more than $600,000 (€525,000) at a roughly $4 million (€3.5 million) post-money valuation, with Portugal-based investment firm Apex leading the way. In doing so, the brand is hoping to carve out its own piece of the $100 billion-plus European cosmetics market by delivering products geared toward improving athletic performance as opposed to makeup and other beauty items.
“We don’t want to be the Nike of cosmetics, but more the L’Oreal of performance,” Louis Cossart, the co-founder of Tiva, said.
The concept of performance cosmetics has been rattling around his brain for years. After Cossart, a Paris native, wrapped up a college tennis career at Shreveport University in Louisiana, he worked in athlete operations at the Tokyo and Paris Olympics, where he started observing the competitors’ performance needs. Cossart also began hitting the gym around that time, which led to frequent and painful blisters on his hands.
Disappointed with the products available to help—especially since, he said, they existed to “heal something once you got hurt”—Cossart took a shot at formulating his own answer. Once he created a concoction he liked using grocery store products, Cossart shared it with a few friends; armed with positive feedback, he started to think bigger.
Cossart and co-founder, Amaury Obadia, who has e-commerce and branding experience, spent around six to eight months developing Tiva’s initial product offering—a gel and a wax. By the end of 2025, the brand landed in its first Intersport, the “Dick’s Sporting Goods of France,” Cossart said.
To spread the word about the products, Tiva reached out to pro athletes, big agencies and racket sports facilities to offer samples. Eventually, the company racked up a notable following among elite athletes spanning tennis, padel, fitness and golf. Tiva even landed with recreational players, which is how Koen Bosma, the head of venture capital at Apex and an “aspiring padel player,” first got a hold of the brand’s products. Now, he “can’t imagine ever stepping on a padel court again without some.”
Apex dabbles in both private equity and venture investing, and for the latter, it focuses on early-stage companies in sports-adjacent categories such as data, nutrition, hydration, sleep, mental health and recovery. The firm also has a robust base of more than 100 athlete investors, offering Tiva an opportunity to expand its awareness in the ranks of the professional sports. Atlanta Braves pitcher and Apex investor Joe Jiménez, for example, inquired about trying the product in his own team’s facility, Bosma told Sportico.
“Their whole ambition is to cover what they call performance cosmetics, and performance cosmetics is not a category that exists today,” he said. “The fact that these guys put in that amount of thought and effort to almost, let’s say, define a category upfront was super interesting.”
In addition to Apex, Tiva now has the backing of other investors, such as ATP CEO Eno Polo, Oaky co-founder Lars Jonker, Adidas veteran Alberto Uncini Manganelli and Momentous, a European venture capital firm. The brand wants to use the cash infusion to grow its French retail presence from 60 locations to more than 200 and enter new markets such as Spain, Italy and Portugal.
It’s also launching its third product, a sunscreen, by the end of June, which Cossart said is a “tool to penetrate” the more than 40,000 pharmacies in France. Tiva aims to cross €1 million ($1.2 million) in revenue this year, and that mark could climb even higher if Cossart achieves his goal of crossing the Atlantic into the U.S. market in 2027.
Svitolina sees herself adding value as Tiva scales. Her status as a top player on the WTA allows her to market the brand’s products around the world, and she has more than two million social followers between Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok. Svitolina can also popularize it back in her native Ukraine, where she has her own padel club.
And even though she stands to reap a financial reward as Tiva grows, there is at least one immediate perk: Svitolina doesn’t have to pay for the gel anymore.
“Finally,” she said with a laugh.
