The Good Bug’s revenue nearly doubled to ₹89.7 crore in FY25, up 103.8% on the year (Inc42, FY25 filings). The same set of books shows a net loss of ₹43.0 crore for that year, wider than the loss it posted twelve months earlier, on a company that sells fermented pickles, probiotic powders and kombucha for a living.
That contradiction — revenue compounding at triple digits while losses grow just as fast — is the story of a category the Mumbai-based startup had to build from nothing. Four years after two former Future Group and multinational-FMCG executives founded it, The Good Bug has raised roughly $18.8 million (₹158.5 crore) from investors including Fireside Ventures, the family office of Marico’s Harsh Mariwala and a Susquehanna-backed venture fund, and crossed a million customers along the way (Inc42, May 2025). Whether the unit economics catch up with the growth is the question this piece tries to answer.
Quick facts
| Company | Seven Turns Private Limited, trading as The Good Bug |
| Founded | Incorporated 23 October 2021; publicly launched November 2022 (Tracxn corporate filing; Fireside Ventures) |
| Founders | Keshav Biyani and Prabhu Karthikeyan Veluswamy |
| Businesses | Gut-health synbiotics, fermented beverages (kombucha, kefir) and a metabolic/weight-management line, sold D2C and via retail |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹89.7 crore in FY25, up 103.8% year on year (Inc42, FY25 filings) |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Net loss of ₹43.0 crore in FY25 (Inc42, FY25 filings) |
| Listed | Private (no listing) |
| Market value / last valuation | Not disclosed; total raised to date ~₹158.5 crore (~$18.8 million) as of May 2025 (Inc42) |
| Key shareholders / CEO | Co-founders Keshav Biyani and Prabhu Karthikeyan Veluswamy; investors Fireside Ventures, Sharrp Ventures, Susquehanna Asia VC |
What they do
The Good Bug sells products aimed at a single, unglamorous problem: an Indian gut that does not work properly. Its core range is synbiotic powders and capsules that combine live probiotic strains with prebiotic fibre, sold alongside naturally fermented foods such as kombucha, water kefir and fermented pickles. In 2025 it added an “Advanced Metabolic System” line pitched at weight management, built around what the company describes as natural GLP-1 science rather than pharmaceutical GLP-1 drugs (Indian Retailer, 2025). The customer is a health-conscious, digitally native Indian adult who has usually tried and been unsatisfied by symptom-relief remedies for bloating, constipation or acidity — the company’s own framing is that roughly half of consumers trying existing digestive products stay dissatisfied because the underlying problem keeps recurring (Fireside Ventures, November 2023).
The origin
Keshav Biyani spent years building and scaling private labels inside Future Group’s home and personal care business before co-founding The Good Bug; Prabhu Karthikeyan Veluswamy arrived with multinational FMCG experience across India, the Middle East and Africa, and this was already his third venture after building and selling a life-sciences brand in India and a consumer brand in Korea (Fireside Ventures, November 2023). Their shared observation was less about probiotics and more about India’s digestive-health numbers: an estimated 600 million Indians report digestive discomfort at least once a month, and roughly 150 million deal with it chronically, inside a digestive-products market Fireside pegged at $3.5 billion and growing near 10% a year (Fireside Ventures, November 2023). Most products on shelves, the founders argued, treated the symptom — an antacid for the acidity, a laxative for the constipation — without touching the microbiome causing it. The Good Bug was built to sell the root-cause fix instead, backed by clinical strains and, eventually, diagnostics and consultation rather than a bottle of capsules alone.
The struggle years
The company’s own financial filings tell a plainer story than any founder anecdote. In FY22, its first full year, The Good Bug booked revenue of just ₹0.26 crore against a net loss of ₹0.15 crore — a business barely off the ground (Entrepreneur India, October 2024, citing regulatory filings). FY23 was the year it tried to become a real company: revenue rose to ₹2.79 crore, an increase of roughly 1,477% off that tiny base, but the net loss ballooned to ₹3.9 crore as it spent on formulation, supply chain and its first hires (Entrepreneur India, October 2024). Losses running many multiples of revenue in back-to-back years is the financial signature of a startup still finding its product-market fit, not one comfortably scaling.
The harder problem was not capital but vocabulary. Co-founder Keshav Biyani has described gut health as a category that barely existed in Indian wellness conversation when the company launched: people knew they were bloated, but did not connect it to their gut, so the first job was educating a market before selling into it (Mediabrief, 2025). Layered on that was trust — an ingestible health product from an unknown brand, in a market wary of supplement claims, meant every claim had to be grounded in clinical data and a scientific advisory board before customers would pay for something they could not immediately see working (Mediabrief, 2025).
The turning point
The inflection is visible in one line of the balance sheet. FY24 revenue was ₹44.0 crore against a net loss of ₹19.6 crore (Inc42 financial filings). A year later, in FY25, revenue had nearly doubled again to ₹89.7 crore — but the loss had more than doubled too, to ₹43.0 crore, as spending on research, marketing and distribution outpaced sales growth (108% expense growth against 103.8% revenue growth) (Inc42 financial filings). That same year, in May 2025, the company closed a ₹100 crore Series B led by Susquehanna Asia VC, its largest round yet, and used part of it to push into weight management with the Advanced Metabolic System, backed by a company-run 90-day trial reporting a 12.01% average weight reduction among participants (Business Standard, May 2025; Indian Retailer, 2025). The turning point, in other words, was not a single funding event but the moment the company chose to spend its way from a niche gut-health label into a broader metabolic-health platform — a bet that has grown the top line fast while pushing profitability further away.
The money behind it
The Good Bug has raised money in three visible institutional rounds since 2023, each bringing in a backer with a distinct reason to be there:
- Fireside Ventures — led the $3.5 million Series A in September 2023, the first institutional capital in, and stayed on as a participant in every subsequent round (Inc42; BW Disrupt, September 2023).
- Sharrp Ventures — the family office of Marico chairman Harsh Mariwala led a $3.5–4 million Series A extension (about ₹30–35 crore) in October 2024, bringing FMCG-scale consumer-distribution credibility alongside Fireside and co-founder Keshav Biyani, who also participated (India Entrepreneur, October 2024).
- Susquehanna Asia VC — led the ₹100 crore (~$11.8 million as reported) Series B in May 2025, with Fireside Ventures continuing to participate, funding a push into R&D, retail expansion and the metabolic-health line (Business Standard, May 2025; Inc42, May 2025).
Across the three rounds, total funding stands at roughly ₹158.5 crore (~$18.8 million) as of May 2025 (Inc42). No post-money valuation has been made public for any round; where third-party databases list one, the figure is behind a paywall and unconfirmed, so it is left out here rather than guessed at.
How it makes money
The business is a straightforward D2C consumer-health model, not a subscription or platform business, though the company has leaned on repeat purchase and diagnostics to lift customer lifetime value:
- Core synbiotics and probiotics — daily powders and capsules, the original and still largest product line, sold as a recurring, habit-forming purchase.
- Fermented beverages and foods — kombucha, water kefir and fermented pickles, positioned as everyday, lower-ticket gut-health items that widen the funnel beyond supplement buyers.
- Metabolic and weight-management line — the Advanced Metabolic System launched in 2025, a higher-ticket product aimed at the same GLP-1-adjacent demand that has driven pharmaceutical weight-loss drugs globally, without being one itself (Indian Retailer, 2025).
- Diagnostics and consultation — gut-health assessments that the company uses to route customers into a personalised product regimen, deepening the relationship beyond a one-off supplement sale (Inc42 company profile).
Money comes in through its own website, marketplaces and quick commerce, and a growing offline footprint of pharmacy chains and airport retail (Indian Retailer, 2025). Money goes out chiefly on research and clinical validation, marketing to build a category that still needs explaining, and the cost of building out an offline distribution network from a standing start — together the reason expenses have consistently outrun revenue. What people tend to get wrong is treating this like a typical low-cost D2C beauty or snacking brand; a health claim in this category needs clinical backing and an advisory board before it can be marketed, which raises the fixed cost of every new product long before it earns a rupee of margin.
The numbers
Figures below are as filed for each fiscal year, unit ₹ crore.
| Fiscal year | Revenue (₹ crore) | Net profit/(loss) (₹ crore) |
|---|---|---|
| FY22 | 0.26 | (0.15) |
| FY23 | 2.79 | (3.9) |
| FY24 | 44.0 | (19.6) |
| FY25 | 89.7 | (43.0) |
- FY23 to FY24 revenue growth: roughly 1,477%, off a very small FY23 base (Entrepreneur India; Inc42).
- FY24 to FY25 revenue growth: 103.8%, the first year growth is off a large-enough base to be meaningfully comparable (Inc42).
- FY25 expenses: ₹132.6 crore against revenue of ₹89.7 crore, an estimated EBITDA of roughly negative ₹42.2 crore (Inc42 financial filings).
- FY25 net margin: approximately negative 47.9%, wider than FY24’s loss ratio (Inc42 financial filings).
Where the money comes from
The Good Bug’s own disclosure of its sales mix is unusually specific for a private D2C company:
- Own website — approximately 60% of revenue, the highest-margin and most data-rich channel (Inc42, May 2025).
- Marketplaces and quick commerce — approximately 30% of revenue, spanning platforms such as Amazon and Flipkart alongside quick-commerce apps (Inc42, May 2025).
- Offline retail — the remainder, roughly 10%, through pharmacy chains and airport retail, a channel the company has been actively building out since 2024–25 (Inc42, May 2025; Indian Retailer, 2025).
The surprise is not that D2C dominates — most Indian wellness upstarts skew that way — but how small offline still is for a brand that says retail expansion is a stated priority for its newest funding round. It suggests the next leg of growth, and quite possibly the next leg of losses, will come from building a channel the company has barely started to scale.
The risks
- Widening losses relative to revenue — FY25’s net loss of ₹43.0 crore against ₹89.7 crore of revenue is a wider ratio than FY24’s, meaning scale has not yet bent the cost curve; expenses grew faster than sales in the same year (Inc42 financial filings).
- Regulatory tightening on health claims — “probiotic” is a regulated term under the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India, which has been moving toward stricter strain-specific labelling and live-culture claim standards; a company built on clinical-claim marketing is more exposed than a generic FMCG brand to any tightening of what it can say on pack (Food Safety Mantra; Nutraceutical Business Review).
- Concentrated, contestable channels — roughly 90% of revenue runs through its own website and third-party marketplaces or quick commerce, both exposed to rising customer-acquisition costs and platform commission or algorithm changes outside the company’s control, in a category that also includes competitors such as Power Gummies and Man Matters (India Entrepreneur, October 2024; Inc42, May 2025).
The takeaway
The Good Bug’s four years say something more general about building a health category in India rather than just selling into one. Growth came only after the company stopped selling a supplement and started selling an explanation — of what the gut does, why symptom relief fails, and why a clinical trial number should matter to someone buying a tin of powder. That education cost money before it made any, which is why the loss curve tracks the revenue curve almost exactly rather than falling behind it. The transferable lesson is not that losses are fine if growth is fast; it is that in a category that has to be taught before it can be sold, the cost of the teaching shows up on the income statement for longer than founders would like, and the real test is whether it shows up for a fixed number of years or indefinitely.
Frequently asked questions
What does The Good Bug sell?
Synbiotic and probiotic powders and capsules, fermented foods and beverages such as kombucha and kefir, and, since 2025, a metabolic and weight-management product line, sold mainly direct to consumer with a growing offline retail presence (Indian Retailer, 2025).
Who founded The Good Bug and when?
Keshav Biyani and Prabhu Karthikeyan Veluswamy founded the company, incorporated as Seven Turns Private Limited on 23 October 2021 and publicly launched in November 2022 (Tracxn corporate filing; Fireside Ventures, November 2023).
How much money has The Good Bug raised, and from whom?
Roughly ₹158.5 crore (~$18.8 million) as of May 2025, across a Series A led by Fireside Ventures (2023), a Series A extension led by Sharrp Ventures (2024), and a Series B led by Susquehanna Asia VC (2025) (Inc42, May 2025; Business Standard, May 2025).
Is The Good Bug profitable?
No. It reported a net loss of ₹43.0 crore in FY25 on revenue of ₹89.7 crore, a wider loss ratio than the ₹19.6 crore loss it posted on ₹44.0 crore of revenue in FY24 (Inc42 financial filings).
How does The Good Bug make most of its sales?
Around 60% of revenue comes from its own website, about 30% from marketplaces and quick commerce, and the remainder from offline retail including pharmacy chains and airport stores (Inc42, May 2025).
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Inc42, company financial and funding profile for The Good Bug, September 2026
- Inc42, “Gut Health Startup The Good Bug Raises INR 100 Cr”, May 2025
- Business Standard, “The Good Bug raises ₹100 crore to scale gut health R&D and reach”, May 2025
- Indian Retailer, “[Funding Alert] The Good Bug Bags Rs 100 Cr to Expand Retail and R&D in Gut Health Space”, May 2025
- Indian Retailer, “Inside The Good Bug’s Retail Playbook: Taking Gut Health from Niche to Mainstream”, 2025
- India Entrepreneur (entrepreneur.com/en-in), “The Good Bug Secures USD 3.5 Mn in Series A Extension to Drive Product Expansion”, October 2024
- BW Disrupt, “D2C Startup The Good Bug Bags $3.5mn From Fireside Ventures”, September 2023
- Fireside Ventures, “Going with our gut: introducing The Good Bug”, November 2023
- Mediabrief, “Exclusive | Keshav Biyani of The Good Bug on making gut health simple, credible, and empowering”, 2025
- Tracxn, corporate filing details for Seven Turns Private Limited, September 2026
- Food Safety Mantra, “FSSAI Guidelines for Probiotics and Prebiotics in India”, 2026
- Nutraceutical Business Review, “Indian government-affiliated experts call for tighter nutraceutical regulations”, 2026
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