Startup Deep Dive : 24 Mantra Organic — the organic pioneer that filed to go public and sold to ITC instead

In January 2022, Sresta Natural Bioproducts filed a draft prospectus with SEBI to raise about Rs 500 crore (about $52 million) on the stock market. It never rang the bell. Three years later the maker of 24 Mantra Organic sold itself whole to ITC for Rs 472.5 crore instead, in an all-cash deal that closed on 13 June 2025.

That single swap — a public listing traded for a corporate buyout at roughly the same headline number — is the story of India’s oldest organic packaged-food brand. It spent two decades proving that a farmer-first, chemical-free supply chain could reach shelves in 1,500-plus outlets and half its revenue from exports, and then discovered that being a pioneer is not the same as being profitable. Every figure below traces to a filing or a report published this year or earlier; where a claim is contested, both sides are named.

Quick facts

What 24 Mantra Organic does

Sresta Natural Bioproducts sells packaged organic food under the 24 Mantra Organic brand to Indian households and to the Indian diaspora abroad. Its own about-page positions it as India’s largest organic packaged-food brand; ITC, in its acquisition release, described it more cautiously as a “pioneer in the domestic organic foods space” and a “leading player in the organic packaged staples category.”

• Product range: over 100 items across grocery staples, dals and flours, spices and condiments, edible oils, culinary pastes, health foods and beverages (ITC press release, 2025).
• Sourcing base: roughly 27,500 farmers on about 1.4 lakh acres of certified organic land across 10 states, as stated at the time of the ITC deal (ITC press release and just-food, 2025). The company’s own site cites higher figures of 34,516 farmers across 12 states.
• Distribution: products sold across India and abroad in 1,500-plus outlets, plus subsidiaries in the US and the UAE (company site and just-food, 2025).
• Standards: products certified to US, EU and Indian organic norms (company site, as of 2025).

The origin: a pesticide field and an IIM graduate

The founding insight predates the company by a decade. Rajashekar Reddy Seelam, an Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad graduate, spent his early career in agri-business, including senior roles at the Murugappa Group’s EID Parry, and carried more than 25 years of industry experience by the time he struck out on his own (theorganicmagazine and YourStory profiles). His account of the trigger is consistent across interviews: while working in the sector in the 1990s he watched farmers pour on pesticides and fertiliser, sinking into debt for inputs while the chemicals ended up in the food chain.

He did not rush. Sresta Natural Bioproducts was incorporated in 2004 after years of groundwork building an organic sourcing ecosystem, and the 24 Mantra brand launched the same year (company site and Crunchbase). The bet was structural rather than fashionable: instead of buying organic produce on the open market, Sresta would convert and certify its own network of farmers, then package and sell the output under one trusted label. That backward-integrated supply chain — the “robust backend and sourcing network,” in the words of ITC director Hemant Malik — is precisely what a Rs 2 lakh crore conglomerate paid to own two decades later.

The struggle years

For a long stretch the market simply was not there. When Seelam started in 2004, organic food was an unknown category in India; by his own telling, the market research pointed to failure and the young team faced the economics of scale with a product few shoppers understood. Organic carried a price premium that most Indian buyers would not pay, and the brand had to educate the market and build a supply chain at the same time.

The numbers of the early years show how slow the climb was. Between 2009 and 2014, revenue grew from about Rs 10.6 crore to about Rs 76.9 crore — real growth, but off a tiny base and funded largely by venture capital rather than by profits (Ventureast and secondary financial coverage). Even at scale the honesty of the model was expensive: Seelam has argued publicly that keeping food genuinely clean carries a roughly 10% cost that regular food avoids (The Ken, 2025). The deeper, structural problem outlasted the awareness problem. As competition multiplied, growth slowed, and Sresta ran into a loyalty gap that dogs the whole category: shoppers who buy organic often stay loyal to the category, not to any one brand (Tracxn company profile and The Ken, 2025).

The turning point: the IPO that never came

The pivot everyone remembers is the one that did not happen. In January 2022, Sresta Natural Bioproducts filed a draft red herring prospectus with SEBI, aiming to raise around Rs 500 crore. The issue was structured as a fresh issue of up to Rs 50 crore plus an offer for sale of up to 70,30,962 shares by existing investors, with JM Financial and Axis Capital as book-running lead managers (Business Standard and SEBI filing, January 2022). For a company that had spent 18 years in a niche category, a public listing would have been vindication and, more practically, an exit for the venture funds that had waited more than a decade.

It never listed. The IPO window for mid-sized consumer names cooled, and instead of the market pricing the business, a strategic buyer did. On 17 April 2025 ITC announced it would acquire Sresta, and on 13 June 2025 it completed the purchase of 100% of the equity for Rs 472.5 crore — Rs 400 crore upfront on a cash-free, debt-free basis, with up to Rs 72.5 crore in performance-linked consideration payable over the following 24 months (Business Standard, storyboard18, just-food and ITC, 2025). The two numbers frame the whole arc: a company that once sought roughly Rs 500 crore from public shareholders was worth Rs 472.5 crore to a single acquirer three years later. The founder’s public line was gracious rather than triumphant: after “21 years of partnering with Indian farmers,” he said, ITC would “drive the next phase of growth” (just-food, 2025).

The money behind it

Sresta was, for most of its life, a venture-funded business rather than a bootstrapped one — which is why the eventual exit mattered so much to its cap table.

• Lead backers: Peepul Capital and Ventureast were the anchor investors; between them the two funds held over 70% of the equity, having invested close to Rs 50 crore (Rs 500 million) across rounds (Ventureast and secondary coverage).
• Other investors: Brand Capital (the ad-for-equity arm of Bennett, Coleman) also featured on the register (Tracxn and Crunchbase profiles).
• Total raised: about $31.7 million across roughly 12 rounds from 15 investors, per aggregator data (Tracxn and Crunchbase; figures are database estimates, not audited).
• What the money bought: capital patient enough to fund a loss-tolerant category build for over a decade, plus the certification and export infrastructure (US and UAE subsidiaries) that a later buyer would value.
• The exit: ITC’s Rs 472.5 crore all-cash deal (100% equity), announced 17 April 2025 and completed 13 June 2025, became the liquidity event the shelved IPO could not provide (Business Standard and ITC, 2025).

On valuation, the only hard, twice-reported number is the acquisition price itself — Rs 472.5 crore — which both Business Standard and just-food carry with the same Rs 400 crore-plus-Rs 72.5 crore structure. The earlier IPO target of “around Rs 500 crore” was a fundraising ambition, not a struck valuation, and is reported as such.

How it makes money

The model is a branded consumer-goods business bolted onto an agricultural supply chain, and the margin math is unusual for FMCG.

• Money in: sales of packaged organic staples and foods, split between the Indian domestic market and exports (about half of revenue, chiefly the US) (just-food and storyboard18, 2025).
• Cost structure: unlike a typical packaged-food player that buys commodities on the open market, Sresta funds the conversion and certification of its own farmer network, then aggregates, processes and packages the output — a heavier, slower cost base built for traceability rather than for the lowest input price.
• Where the margin sits: in the brand premium organic commands over conventional food — but Seelam’s own “roughly 10% honesty cost” framing (The Ken, 2025) explains why that premium translates into thin bottom-line margins rather than fat ones.
• The part people get wrong: the business looks like a high-margin premium brand but has behaved like a low-margin agri-processor. On revenue of roughly Rs 300 crore, reported net profit peaked in the low double-digit crores (see the numbers below), a net margin in the low single digits.

The numbers

Public, comparable figures are patchy because Sresta stayed private and detailed later-year filings sit behind paywalls; the cleanest audited series comes from the FY19–FY21 figures disclosed for the DRHP. Unit: Rs crore.

Three things stand out. Revenue plateaued: the roughly Rs 314 crore of FY21 and roughly Rs 306 crore of FY24 are essentially flat across three years, and FY25 fell back to about Rs 278 crore. Profit was always thin: even in its best disclosed year the company cleared about Rs 10–14 crore on around Rs 300 crore of sales. And the recent trend turned down: Tofler records a roughly 5.2% revenue decline in FY25 alongside a net-worth erosion of about 117% year on year, which points to a loss, though no audited FY25 profit-and-loss figure is public. Where a number could not be verified — notably FY24 and FY25 net profit — it has been left blank rather than estimated.

Where the money comes from

The revenue split is where the surprise lives for a brand marketed as quintessentially Indian.

• Exports vs domestic: roughly 50% of FY24 revenue came from international markets, chiefly the US, sold to the Indian diaspora (just-food and storyboard18, 2025). For a home-market organic brand, that is an unusually high export share.
• Category mix: organic packaged staples are the core, with 24 Mantra described by ITC as a “leading player in the organic packaged staples category” (ITC press release, 2025); spices, oils, health foods and beverages round out the 100-plus SKUs.
• Geographic sourcing: production is spread across roughly 10 states and 1.4 lakh acres of certified land at the time of the deal (ITC, 2025) — a wide, deliberately diversified base rather than a single-region supply.
• Channel: a mix of general and modern trade across 1,500-plus outlets plus own stores and the export subsidiaries in the US and UAE (company site and just-food, 2025).

The takeaway from the split: this is as much an export-and-diaspora business as a domestic one, and its supply chain — not its shelf presence in India — is the asset ITC singled out.

The risks

These are concrete, mechanism-level risks, drawn where possible from what the company and category disclose.

• A niche category that keeps waiting: India’s organic food market was pegged at about Rs 10,000 crore (domestic and exports combined) at the time of the deal (ITC, 2025). Organic remains a small slice of total food spend, and adoption has lagged expectations for years (The Ken, 2025) — capping how large any single organic brand can grow.
• Loyalty to the category, not the brand: industry analysis notes that organic buyers often trust “organic” as a label more than any one company’s name, so 24 Mantra’s premium is vulnerable to cheaper certified rivals (Tracxn and The Ken, 2025).
• Thin, deteriorating economics: net profit peaked around Rs 10–14 crore on roughly Rs 300 crore of sales, and FY25 saw revenue slip about 5.2% with net worth eroding sharply (Tijori, DRHP and Tofler) — little cushion if input or certification costs rise.
• Export concentration: with about half of revenue from overseas, mainly the US, the business carries currency risk and single-market dependence on diaspora demand (just-food, 2025).

The takeaway

The transferable lesson from 24 Mantra Organic is that being first is a moat only if the market shows up in time. Seelam read the direction of Indian food correctly a decade early, built the hard, unglamorous asset — a certified farmer network with real traceability — and stayed honest about the cost of doing so. What he could not manufacture was demand: the organic category grew, but slowly, and a brand can only compound as fast as its market. When the public-market route closed, the same backward-integrated supply chain that made the company hard to build made it valuable to buy, and a conglomerate with distribution muscle paid Rs 472.5 crore for the backend rather than the brand. For founders in patient, category-creating businesses, the exit may not be the IPO you file for — it may be the strategic buyer who wants the machine you spent 20 years building.

Frequently asked questions

Who owns 24 Mantra Organic now?

ITC Limited. It acquired 100% of Sresta Natural Bioproducts, the maker of 24 Mantra Organic, for Rs 472.5 crore in an all-cash deal completed on 13 June 2025, per Business Standard, just-food and ITC’s own release.

How much did ITC pay for Sresta Natural Bioproducts?

Rs 472.5 crore in total: Rs 400 crore upfront on a cash-free, debt-free basis, plus up to Rs 72.5 crore in performance-linked consideration over 24 months (Business Standard and ITC, 2025).

Who founded 24 Mantra Organic and when?

Rajashekar Reddy Seelam, an IIM Ahmedabad graduate and former EID Parry executive, incorporated Sresta Natural Bioproducts in 2004 and launched the 24 Mantra brand the same year (company site and YourStory).

Did 24 Mantra Organic ever go public?

No. Sresta filed a draft prospectus with SEBI in January 2022 to raise around Rs 500 crore, but the IPO never proceeded; the company was acquired by ITC in 2025 instead (Business Standard and SEBI, 2022; ITC, 2025).

How much revenue does 24 Mantra Organic make?

Consolidated turnover was about Rs 306 crore in FY24 (just-food) and roughly Rs 278 crore in FY25 (Tracxn), with about half of FY24 revenue coming from exports, chiefly the US.

Sources

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

• Business Standard, “ITC completes acquisition of 24 Mantra Organic brand owner Sresta Natural,” June 2025; and “ITC set to acquire 24 Mantra Organic brand in Rs 472.5 crore deal,” April 2025.
• Storyboard18, “ITC completes Rs 472.5 cr acquisition of Sresta Natural, owner of 24 Mantra Organic,” June 2025.
• just-food, “ITC seals deal to buy organic packaged foods brand 24 Mantra owner,” 2025.
• ITC Limited press release, “ITC to acquire 24 Mantra Organic — a pioneer in organic packaged foods,” April 2025.
• Business Standard, “Sresta Natural Bioproducts aims to raise Rs 500 cr via IPO, seeks Sebi nod,” January 2022; SEBI public-issues filing, January 2022.
• Ventureast, “Peepul Capital and Ventureast-backed Sresta Natural Bioproducts files DRHP for an IPO,” 2022.
• Tracxn and Crunchbase, Sresta Natural Bioproducts / 24 Mantra company profiles (funding, revenue estimates), 2025–2026.
• Tofler and Tijori Finance, Sresta Natural Bioproducts financial snapshots (FY19–FY25 profit and net-worth indicators), 2025–2026.
• The Ken, “Forget organic, even regular food has a 10% honesty cost: 24 Mantra founder,” and “ITC’s 24 Mantra deal and organic foods’ unending wait for glory,” 2025.
• YourStory, TheOrganicMagazine and FoodNavigator, founder profiles and interviews with Rajashekar Reddy Seelam, 2017–2025.
• 24 Mantra Organic official website (about-us), farmer network and product-range claims, accessed 2026.

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