Startup Deep Dive : Myntra — the mug startup that became India’s biggest fashion marketplace

In FY25, the company that once nearly killed itself by shutting down its own website posted a net profit of ₹548.3 crore (around $57 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) on revenue of ₹6,042.7 crore, as per its regulatory filings reported by Entrackr in September 2025. That number is 18 times what it earned the year before.

The company is Myntra, and the contradiction sitting inside those figures is this: nearly half of that revenue, ₹2,918.9 crore, did not come from selling a single T-shirt. It came from logistics and fulfilment services billed within the group. Myntra makes as much money moving clothes as it does selling them, and understanding that is the key to understanding how a personalised-gifting website that almost shut down in 2010 became India’s largest fashion marketplace.

Quick facts

What they do

Myntra runs a fashion and lifestyle marketplace that sells clothing, footwear, accessories and beauty products from thousands of brands to shoppers across India, alongside its own private labels such as Roadster, HRX and Mast & Harbour. It layers a biannual discount event, the End of Reason Sale, and a newer 30-minute delivery service called M-Now on top of the core marketplace, aiming to serve everyone from a Tier-3 shopper looking for value basics to a metro shopper who wants a Tommy Hilfiger shirt delivered before dinner.

The origin

Mukesh Bansal spent close to a decade in Silicon Valley through the late 1990s and 2000s, working at startups including NexTag, Centrata and NewScale after a first stint as a systems analyst with Deloitte in Chicago, according to his IIT Kanpur alumni profile and multiple founder biographies. He returned to India in February 2007 and started a company with two IIT Kanpur juniors, Ashutosh Lawania and Vineet Saxena. The original idea had nothing to do with fashion: Myntra sold personalised gifts, letting customers print a name or photo onto mugs, T-shirts and mousepads, run largely as a business-to-business operation for corporate gifting. The founding insight was really a correction. By 2010 the trio had worked out that personalised gifting was a one-time-purchase category with a low ceiling; people buy a monogrammed mug once, not every month. Fashion, by contrast, is a category people return to again and again. In 2011, Myntra dropped personalisation and rebuilt itself as an online fashion and lifestyle store.

The struggle years

The pivot away from gifting between 2010 and 2011 was itself born of a near-death: the original business model was running out of runway in a market too small to justify the capital being spent on it, which is why the founders rebuilt the company around fashion rather than iterating on gifting. The second, more public disaster came in 2015. On 15 May 2015, Myntra shut its desktop website entirely and went app-only, at a time when roughly 90% of its traffic and 70% of its business already ran through the app, according to reporting on the move at the time. The bet was that mobile was the future and that forcing the switch would accelerate it. Instead, the company said the move cost it a reported 10% decline in sales, as shoppers who wanted to browse on a laptop, or simply didn’t want to install an app, went to competitors instead. By February 2016 Myntra had publicly conceded the app-only experiment had failed, and it reinstated the desktop website from 1 June 2016, a rare and unusually candid reversal for an Indian consumer internet company at the time.

The turning point

The event that changed Myntra’s trajectory most was its sale to Flipkart, announced and completed in May 2014. The context on one side of that deal: Myntra had just closed a $50 million Series E round in February 2014 from Premji Invest and other private investors, giving it a fresh war chest, but Amazon had entered India the previous year and both Amazon and Flipkart were racing to build fashion depth before the other could. On the other side of the deal: three months after that Series E closed, Flipkart bought all of Myntra for a price reported as approximately $300 million by TechCrunch and as ₹2,000 crore (about $327.7 million) by other accounts, along with a further $100 million commitment to build out the fashion business. Myntra’s CEO Mukesh Bansal stayed on to run the unit and also took charge of Flipkart’s own fashion vertical, and the combined entity set a target of capturing more than 65% of India’s online fashion market. The deal converted Myntra from an independent, VC-funded fashion site racing two much larger rivals into the fashion arm of one of them, with a warehouse network and balance sheet no standalone startup could match.

The money behind it

Before the Flipkart deal, Myntra raised roughly $125 million in total across five funding rounds, per multiple accounts of its cap table. It started with about $5 million in Series A funding in November 2008 from NEA-IndoUS Ventures, IDG Ventures and Accel Partners, money that funded the personalised-gifting years. Tiger Global then led a $20 million round toward the end of 2011, the round that effectively bankrolled the pivot to fashion and the early build-out of the marketplace. The final round before the sale, a $50 million Series E in February 2014 backed by Premji Invest, gave Myntra the balance sheet strength to negotiate its exit from a position of relative confidence rather than distress. Since May 2014, Myntra has not raised outside capital or carried its own valuation: it operates as a wholly owned subsidiary inside the Flipkart Group, which itself completed a re-domiciliation from Singapore to India in March 2026 and separately demerged PhonePe, as both entities position for potential public listings. Flipkart’s own targeted IPO valuation has been reported in the $40-70 billion range, but no piece of that has been separately assigned to Myntra.

How it makes money

Myntra’s FY25 regulatory filings, as reported by Entrackr, break its operating revenue into three lines, and the split surprises people who assume a fashion site earns primarily on the margin between wholesale and retail price. Marketplace services, the commissions and fees Myntra charges brands and sellers for listing and selling on its platform, brought in ₹2,051.8 crore. Advertising, brands paying for sponsored placement and search visibility, brought in ₹914.5 crore and grew faster than the rest of the business. But the largest single line was logistics, at ₹2,918.9 crore, or 48.3% of operating revenue: fees for warehousing, packing and last-mile delivery that Myntra bills for fulfilling orders. The part people get wrong is treating Myntra as primarily a retailer taking a cut on clothes; on its own numbers, it looks just as much like a logistics company that happens to sell fashion. The catch is that logistics is also where the money leaks back out: the company’s logistics costs came to roughly ₹1,999 crore against advertising costs of ₹2,105.3 crore, and overall the company reported spending about ₹0.95 for every rupee of revenue it earned in FY25, per the same filings, which is consistent with an EBITDA margin of 8.78% even in a profitable year.

The numbers

Unit: ₹ crore. Figures are from Myntra Designs Private Limited’s regulatory filings as reported by Entrackr and corroborated by YourStory and Business Standard.

The swing from a ₹782.4 crore loss in FY23 to a ₹548.3 crore profit in FY25, a turnaround of over ₹1,330 crore in two years, coincided with Myntra pulling back on discount-led customer acquisition and leaning harder on its higher-margin advertising and logistics lines. It is also worth noting, in the interest of not overstating the FY25 number, that the FY25 profit included a deferred tax credit of about ₹135 crore, per Entrackr’s reporting, meaning the underlying operating improvement, while real, is somewhat smaller than the headline profit figure alone suggests.

Where the money comes from

Beyond the operating-revenue split above, Myntra’s own reporting of its FY25 event calendar shows how concentrated demand still is around its sale cycles: the End of Reason Sale that closed in June 2025 saw orders roughly double over business-as-usual levels and a 1.3 times rise in new customers compared with the previous edition, according to Business Standard’s coverage of the event. The surprise in the mix is how quickly the newer, unglamorous part of the business is growing relative to the core marketplace: M-Now, the 30-minute quick-commerce fashion service launched in November 2024, accounted for close to 10% of total orders in the ten cities where it operates by November 2025, and on the first day of the June 2025 End of Reason Sale, M-Now itself saw a four-times spike in orders over normal levels. A business built on planned, browse-and-wait fashion shopping is now generating a meaningful share of impulse, same-day demand, which is a different customer habit than the one Myntra spent its first decade building.

The risks

The first risk is structural to the category: fashion e-commerce carries return rates estimated at 25-30%, and in some reporting above 30%, because shoppers cannot try before they buy and size or fit disappoints often. Every returned order has already been paid for once in outbound delivery and must be paid for again in reverse pickup, quality checking and restocking, which is one reason Myntra’s own logistics costs of roughly ₹1,999 crore sit so close to its ₹2,918.9 crore of logistics revenue. The second risk is margin pressure from competition that is not going away: Ajio, backed by Reliance Retail’s balance sheet and store network, has been estimated to hold somewhere between 25% and 30% of India’s online fashion market, while independent estimates of Myntra’s own share range from about 30-35% (Business Standard/company reporting) to as high as 35-45% (industry market-share estimates), a spread wide enough that “market leader” is defensible but “runaway leader” is not, and Amazon Fashion and the fast-growing, value-focused Meesho add further pricing pressure from both the premium and budget ends. The third risk is leadership and governance continuity at a sensitive moment: CEO Nandita Sinha was reported in 2026 to be stepping down as Flipkart pushes toward a possible IPO valued as high as $70 billion, and management transitions at a subsidiary this size, arriving just as the parent prepares for the disclosure standards of a public listing, carry execution risk that a private, founder-led Myntra of the 2010s did not have to manage.

The takeaway

Myntra’s most transferable lesson is not “fashion e-commerce works”, it is that a company can survive being wrong about its core business twice, as long as it is honest about the failure fast enough to change course before the capital runs out. It was wrong about personalised gifting being a big enough market, and it corrected within about three years. It was wrong about app-only being the future of Indian mobile commerce, and it reversed within twelve months, in public, rather than quietly bleeding out. Both times, the company chose a fast, visible reversal over defending a decision that the numbers had already disproven. That habit, more than any single funding round or acquisition, is what let a personalised-mug startup still be standing, and profitable, nearly two decades later.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded Myntra and when?

Myntra was founded in 2007 by Mukesh Bansal along with Ashutosh Lawania and Vineet Saxena, all connected through IIT Kanpur, initially as a personalised-gifting business before it pivoted to fashion in 2011.

When did Flipkart acquire Myntra, and for how much?

Flipkart acquired Myntra in May 2014. The deal value has been reported as approximately $300 million by TechCrunch and as ₹2,000 crore (about $327.7 million) in other accounts, alongside a further $100 million commitment to grow the fashion business.

Is Myntra profitable?

Yes, as of its most recent filings. Myntra reported a net profit of ₹548.3 crore in FY25 on revenue of ₹6,042.7 crore, its second consecutive profitable year after a ₹782.4 crore loss in FY23 and a ₹30.9 crore profit in FY24, as per its regulatory filings reported by Entrackr.

How does Myntra actually make money?

Through three main lines disclosed in its FY25 filings: marketplace commissions and fees (₹2,051.8 crore), advertising and sponsored placements (₹914.5 crore), and logistics and fulfilment services (₹2,918.9 crore), which was the single largest revenue line.

What is M-Now?

M-Now is Myntra’s quick-commerce service, launched in November 2024, that delivers fashion, beauty and lifestyle products within about 30 minutes in select cities, and it accounted for close to 10% of Myntra’s total orders in those cities by November 2025.

Sources

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

• TechCrunch, “Indian Ecommerce Giant Flipkart Buys Fashion E-tailer Myntra To Fight Amazon’s Growth”, May 2014
• Wikipedia, “Myntra” (acquisition value ₹2,000 crore / $327.71 million), accessed September 2026
• Entrackr, “Myntra profit zooms 18X to Rs 548 Cr in FY25”, September 2025
• YourStory, “Myntra’s net profit soars 18x to Rs 548 crore in FY25”, September 2025
• Business Standard, “Myntra net profit jumps 18-fold as fashion ecommerce gains momentum”, September 2025
• Entrackr, “Myntra’s FY24 turnaround: From massive loss to Rs 31 Cr profit”, 2024
• Newsbytes, “Myntra swings to profit in FY24 after FY23 ₹782cr loss”, 2024
• Business Standard, “Myntra’s End of Reason Sale sees 2X order spike, led by non-metros”, June 2025
• TechCrunch, “Myntra pushes into India’s quick commerce race with 30-minute fashion delivery”, December 2024
• Business Standard, “5 reasons why Myntra is ditching app-only strategy, going back to website”, May 2016
• Knowledge at Wharton, “Why India’s Leading Fashion E-tailer Abandoned Its App-only Strategy”, 2016
• TechCrunch, “Rocket Internet’s Jabong sold to Flipkart-owned rival Myntra for $70M”, July 2016
• Clay, “How Much Did Myntra Raise? Funding & Key Investors”, accessed September 2026
• IIT Kanpur Alumni Association, profile of Mukesh Bansal, accessed September 2026
• bestmediainfo.com, “Ahead of Flipkart IPO, Myntra CEO Nandita Sinha likely to step down”, 2026
• Inc42, “Myntra’s Musical Chairs”, 2026

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