Startup Deep Dive : Vahdam — a Rs 55 crore loss became a Rs 5.2 crore profit in two years

In FY23, VAHDAM India lost Rs 55 crore. Two years later, in FY25, it turned a Rs 5.2 crore profit — while still sending 95% of everything it makes outside the country it was built to represent.

That is the contradiction sitting at the heart of VAHDAM: a company that calls itself a homegrown Indian tea brand, built by a 23-year-old from a family that has sold tea for generations, and yet earns almost nothing from India itself. Its story is less about tea and more about what it takes to sell a commodity as a premium, branded, direct-to-consumer product to a customer 12,000 kilometres away — and to do it profitably.

Quick facts

What they do

VAHDAM sources, processes and packs tea, herbal infusions, spices and a growing line of superfoods and wellness products directly from farms and small growers in India, and sells them under its own brand — mostly to consumers outside India. The company packages everything “at origin” in a BRC-certified facility in Delhi, skipping the layer of blending houses and auction floors that most Indian tea passes through before it reaches a foreign shelf. It sells through its own websites (vahdam.in for India, vahdam.com for the US and international markets), through Amazon in the US and India, and — more recently — through offline retail, with its teas and botanicals stocked in more than 2,000 Walmart stores across the United States, according to VAHDAM’s own statement carried by Outlook Business in March 2025.

The origin

Bala Sarda was born in Delhi in 1991 into a family that had been in the tea trade for generations; his family’s business, Nathmulls Tea, traces back to 1931, according to Forbes India’s August 2020 profile of the company. While studying for a management degree at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, Sarda noticed that the “Indian tea” sold on European and American shelves was frequently a blend cut with cheaper leaf from other origins, sold through several layers of middlemen who captured most of the margin before it reached a grower or a brand. He named the company VAHDAM — a reverse anagram of his father’s first name, Madhav — and set out to sell traceable, farm-direct Indian tea straight to a foreign consumer, cutting out the blenders and auction intermediaries in between, as per the company’s own “Our Story” page and corroborated in a Global Indian profile of Sarda.

The struggle years

The idea did not travel smoothly. Early on, Sarda set up processing in Siliguri, West Bengal, close to the tea gardens of Darjeeling and Assam — and had to abandon the site within two weeks because ambient moisture was damaging the packed tea, forcing a costly relocation to Delhi, as per Forbes India’s August 2020 account. In its first full year of operations, the company posted just Rs 1.5 crore in revenue, with Sarda telling Forbes India he felt his “business was still not glamorous” and that tea was seen as a commodity, not a brand, back home — and it took him roughly six months of investor rejections before anyone backed the idea. The deeper near-death came years later, on the balance sheet rather than the shelf: VAHDAM India recorded a Rs 55 crore net loss in FY23 (year ended March 2023), even as revenue for that year came in at Rs 203.6 crore, according to financial filings reported by Entrackr in January 2025 — a loss wide enough that the company had to visibly cut spending the following year just to survive on its own terms rather than raise a rescue round.

The turning point

Instead of raising a large emergency round, VAHDAM chose to cut costs. Advertising spend was pulled back 18.9% to about Rs 50 crore in FY24, and freight and forwarding costs — the company’s biggest single expense — were trimmed 7% to Rs 68 crore, per Entrackr’s January 2025 reporting on the FY24 filings. That single-year discipline turned a Rs 55 crore FY23 loss into a much narrower Rs 17.7 crore loss in FY24, a 68% reduction, and set up the swing that followed: by FY25, with revenue up a further 19% to Rs 267.5 crore, VAHDAM closed the year with a Rs 5.2 crore net profit — its first reported annual profit as a standalone entity — as per Entrackr’s November 2025 report on the FY25 numbers. Two fiscal years, and the same company moved from a Rs 55 crore hole to positive earnings, without a change of business model, only a change of spending discipline.

The money behind it

VAHDAM’s capital table reads like a checklist of consumer-brand investors. Fireside Ventures, the Mumbai-based fund built specifically to back Indian consumer brands, was an early institutional backer, alongside Sixth Sense Ventures. In its September 2021 Series D round, VAHDAM raised Rs 174 crore ($23.6 million at the time) led by IIFL Asset Management Company’s private equity fund, with participation from Sixth Sense Ventures, the Mankind Group family office and the Kris Gopalakrishnan family office, at a post-money valuation of about Rs 700 crore (roughly $73 million at $1 ≈ Rs 96.0) — a figure reported independently by both Venture Intelligence and Entrepreneur India in September 2021. Trackers differ on the cumulative primary capital raised since the company’s 2016 seed round: Tracxn’s company profile puts total funding at $42.9 million across nine rounds, while contemporaneous 2021 deal reporting tallied cumulative equity at around Rs 290 crore at that point. What each backer changed was less about cash and more about access: Fireside and Sixth Sense brought consumer-brand-building playbooks, while IIFL AMC’s entry in 2021 signalled to later, more conservative capital that VAHDAM could be underwritten like a scaling export business rather than a niche D2C experiment. The most recent capital infusion — Rs 25 crore (about $3 million) from SIDBI Venture Capital in February 2025 — was described by the company as a strategic investment rather than a priced round, meant to fund product R&D and in-house manufacturing capacity, as per Outlook Business’s March 2025 report.

How it makes money

The model is export-led direct-to-consumer: source tea, herbs and spices from Indian growers, pack them under VAHDAM’s own brand, and sell at a premium price point directly to a consumer in the US or Europe rather than through a private-label or wholesale arrangement. Money comes in through VAHDAM’s own websites, its Amazon storefronts, and — increasingly — offline shelf space at retailers like Walmart. Money goes out overwhelmingly on two lines: getting the product to the customer, and getting the customer to the product. Transportation (freight, forwarding and logistics) was VAHDAM’s single largest cost in FY25 at Rs 71.5 crore, or about 27% of total costs, and advertising was the second largest at Rs 58 crore, up 16% year on year — together dwarfing the Rs 48 crore spent on the raw tea, spices and herbs themselves, according to Entrackr’s November 2025 breakdown of the FY25 filings. That is the part people tend to get wrong about a “tea company”: the product cost is almost incidental: the real cost structure is a cross-border logistics and customer-acquisition business that happens to sell tea, which is also why the margin stayed thin — an EBITDA margin of just 2.55% in FY25 — even in the year the company turned profitable.

The numbers

Three years of filings show a company growing revenue steadily while its bottom line swung from a wide loss to a narrow profit. Figures below are from RoC filings as reported by Entrackr (January 2025 for FY23–FY24; November 2025 for FY25), all in Rs crore.

Revenue grew 10.6% in FY24 and a further 19% in FY25. Losses shrank 68% in FY24 before turning into a modest profit in FY25 — a slower, cost-led recovery rather than a sudden revenue breakout.

Where the money comes from

The geography split is stark and has stayed stark. In FY25, exports to the US, Europe and Canada brought in Rs 254.5 crore, or 95% of VAHDAM’s Rs 267.5 crore revenue from operations, up 21% from Rs 210 crore in FY24 — leaving India, the country the brand is explicitly built to represent, contributing only around Rs 12–13 crore, as per Entrackr’s November 2025 reporting. That imbalance is not new: as far back as 2020, Forbes India described VAHDAM’s international mix as roughly half from the US and 30% from Europe. The surprise is less that VAHDAM sells abroad — that was the founding thesis — and more how little of its scale has translated into its home market even a decade in, despite India being the world’s largest black tea consumer base and Sarda’s own repeated public ambition to “win” there too.

The risks

First, geographic concentration: with 95% of revenue tied to the US, Canada and Europe, VAHDAM is exposed to demand and currency swings in those markets far more than to anything happening in India. Second, trade policy: the US imposed a cumulative 50% tariff on a wide swathe of Indian exports through 2025, in stages including a 25% reciprocal tariff and a further 25% levy effective 27 August 2025, as reported by Euronews — a mechanism that raises landed costs for any India-based exporter selling into the US, VAHDAM’s largest single market, even where the company has not itself disclosed a specific rupee impact. Third, thin structural margins: VAHDAM’s cost base is dominated by freight (27% of costs) and advertising (about 22% of costs) rather than the tea itself, which means its 2.55% FY25 EBITDA margin has very little room to absorb a shock in shipping rates, ad prices or tariffs before profitability disappears again, as it did as recently as FY23.

The takeaway

VAHDAM’s turnaround did not come from a new product, a new market, or a new round of funding — it came from tightening freight and advertising spend for one full fiscal year and letting revenue growth do the rest. The lesson travels beyond tea: for any direct-to-consumer export business where logistics and customer acquisition — not the product itself — are the largest costs, the fastest route back to profit is rarely a bigger raise. It is often just spending less to acquire and ship the same growing base of orders, and being patient enough to let a 68% cut in losses compound into an actual profit a year later.

Frequently asked questions

What does VAHDAM India sell?

VAHDAM sells tea, herbal infusions, spices and wellness/superfood products sourced directly from Indian farms, packaged under its own brand and sold mostly to consumers in the US, Canada and Europe, alongside a smaller domestic India business.

Who founded VAHDAM and when?

Bala Sarda founded VAHDAM in 2015 at age 23, drawing on his family’s decades-long history in the tea trade and an insight he formed while studying at the University of Warwick in the UK.

Is VAHDAM India profitable?

Yes, as of its latest reported fiscal year. VAHDAM posted a Rs 5.2 crore net profit in FY25 (year ended March 2025), a turnaround from a Rs 17.7 crore loss in FY24 and a Rs 55 crore loss in FY23, per RoC filings reported by Entrackr.

How much funding has VAHDAM raised, and what is it worth?

VAHDAM has raised capital across nine rounds since 2016, with Tracxn’s tracker putting cumulative funding at $42.9 million. Its last disclosed valuation was about Rs 700 crore, at its September 2021 Series D round led by IIFL Asset Management Company; a further Rs 25 crore came from SIDBI Venture Capital in February 2025 as a strategic, non-priced investment.

Does VAHDAM sell much in India?

Very little relative to its total size. Exports to the US, Canada and Europe made up about 95% of VAHDAM’s Rs 267.5 crore FY25 revenue, leaving India with roughly Rs 12–13 crore of sales despite the brand’s homegrown positioning.

Sources

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

• Forbes India, “Vahdam Teas: Can the online tea empire replicate its success at home?”, August 2020
• Global Indian, “Vahdam’s got the tea: How Bala Sarda built his ‘Made in India, for the world’ brand”
• VAHDAM India, “Our Story” (company website)
• Venture Intelligence, “Tea brand Vahdam raises Rs 174-Cr from IIFL, Sixth Sense, others”, September 2021
• Entrepreneur India, “Vahdam India Raises INR 174 Cr In Series D Funding Led By IIFL AMC”, September 2021
• Entrackr, “VAHDAM India narrows losses by 68% to Rs 18 Cr in FY24”, January 2025
• Entrackr, “VAHDAM India turns profitable in FY25; clocks 95% revenue from global markets”, November 2025
• Outlook Business, “VAHDAM India Secures $3 Million from SIDBI Ventures, Turns Profitable in FY25”, March 2025
• Euronews, “India braces for export shock as 50% US tariff takes effect”, August 2025
• Tracxn, VAHDAM company profile (funding rounds and totals), accessed September 2026
• Trading Economics, USD/INR reference rate, 18 September 2026

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