Startup Deep Dive : Svami Drinks — valued at Rs 100 crore before it crossed Rs 20 crore in sales

In August 2022, a craft gin maker paid a valuation of Rs 100 crore (roughly $10.4 million at $1 ≈ Rs 96.0, 18 September 2026 — Trading Economics) for control of a tonic-water company that, by its own paperwork, had not yet crossed Rs 20 crore in annual sales. The buyer, Third Eye Distillery Holdings, maker of Stranger & Sons gin, was not betting on today’s revenue. It was betting on a brand called Svami that had spent six years teaching India’s bars what a proper mixer tastes like.

That gap between reputation and revenue runs through Svami’s whole story. It became the name bartenders reached for years before its financial statements caught up, and the company that eventually took a majority stake in it was not a private-equity fund but a rival in the same drinks cabinet. What follows is what the public record — company filings, deal coverage and the founders’ own interviews — actually shows about how that happened.

Quick facts

What they do

Svami makes the drinks that go around, not into, the glass: tonic water, ginger ale, sodas and, more recently, ready-to-drink cocktail mixers such as gin and tonic and rum and cola. Its customer is dual. On one side sit bars, restaurants and hotels building a cocktail menu around imported or craft spirits; on the other, home drinkers who buy the same bottles off a supermarket or e-commerce shelf to mix their own. The company’s pitch has always been the same: mass-market mixers like Schweppes were built for volume, not flavour, and a premium spirit deserves a mixer that was not an afterthought.

The origin

The three founders came at the problem from different corners of the drinks trade. Sahil Jatana had built one of India’s first online coffee retailers. Rahul Mehra had started one of Mumbai’s early craft breweries. Aneesh Bhasin had photographed sommeliers and winemakers before building India’s first app for discovering wine and spirits. None of them set out to make tonic water. What pushed them there was a gap they kept running into as India’s gin and cocktail culture picked up through the mid-2010s: the country had increasingly good spirits and increasingly bad mixers. Bar menus were filling up with global and home-grown liquor brands, and there was nothing decent to pour alongside them.

So they built it themselves. Bhasin has described spending roughly six months sourcing and testing quinine — the bittering agent in tonic water — from different parts of the world, alongside citrus and botanicals, before settling on a recipe the three of them would keep drinking on its own merits. Production stayed in-house from the start: small-batch mixing tanks, slow carbonation over several days, then bottling and labelling under standards the founders set themselves rather than outsourcing to a contract bottler.

The struggle years

Svami’s early growth looked good on paper and thin in absolute terms at the same time, and two moments expose that clearly.

The first was March 2020. A business built around bars, restaurants and five-star hotel bars — Svami counted properties like Ritz-Carlton, Marriott, Conrad, Sheraton Grand and Westin among its HoReCa accounts, per YourStory’s September 2021 account — watched that entire channel shut overnight when the COVID-19 lockdowns hit. The company’s response was to reinvent its product line for a home-drinking, off-trade world: a 3-calorie tonic launched in May 2020, followed by a ready-to-drink range in November 2020 covering gin and tonic, rum and cola, and pink gin and tonic, aimed squarely at people mixing their own drinks at home rather than ordering at a bar (Business India). It worked well enough to open new cities — Chennai, Pune and Hyderabad among them — but it was a forced pivot, not a planned one.

The second is less dramatic but more revealing: the gap between ambition and audited numbers. In September 2021, YourStory reported Svami’s FY21 revenue at Rs 6.5 crore (Business India separately put the same year at Rs 6.2 crore), up roughly 200 percent on the prior year, with the company publicly targeting Rs 100 crore in revenue by 2024. That target was not met by any measure in the public record. By the time Man’s World India profiled the company in February 2024, it described a “four-year-old” Svami that had “yet to cross the Rs 20 crore sales mark” even after its 2022 ownership change — a fifth of the number the founders had put out three years earlier.

The turning point

The defining event is the August 2022 sale of a majority stake to Third Eye Distillery Holdings, the company behind Stranger & Sons gin. On one side of that transaction sat a business whose own recent financial filings would later show revenue falling, not rising: Rs 7.0 crore in FY22 down to Rs 4.2 crore in FY23, a roughly 40 percent drop, according to Tracxn’s tracking of Foxtrot Beverages’ MCA filings and corroborated by TheCompanyCheck’s reading of the same accounts. On the other side sat a Rs 100 crore valuation, publicly confirmed by Third Eye co-founder Vidur Gupta and reported by M&A Critique and Man’s World India. Third Eye took what M&A Critique reported as a 51 percent stake, though Bar & Bench’s coverage of the deal’s legal advisory (Universal Legal) confirmed only that the stake was “majority” without a specific number. Bhasin stayed on to run the business. Gupta framed the logic in trade coverage: Third Eye wanted to build “a premium house of brands… something like a Diageo or Pernod Ricard,” and a category-leading non-alcoholic mixer brand was a natural adjacent bet to its gin business, giving Svami access to capital and an existing distribution network spanning multiple Indian metros and, per Third Eye’s own international footprint, nine or more countries.

The money behind it

• Seed round, August 2018: amount undisclosed; backers included RB Investments (Singapore) and Jeremie Horowitz, among others (Tracxn).
• Pre-Series A, November 2019: Rs 7.5 crore, led by Rukam Capital Trust, with Niren Shah — managing director of Norwest Venture Partners India — investing in a personal capacity, alongside Yukti Securities, the family office of investor Ashish Chand (India Entrepreneur; YourStory). Rukam’s Archana Jahagirdar said the founders’ “zeal and the product impressed us the most” given bar menus increasingly needed premium mixers to match premium spirits.
• Bridge / Series A, October 2020: a further round reported at roughly Rs 6.5 crore with around 63 participants, structured as a convertible note (Business India; Tracxn).
• Total raised before the 2022 deal: reported between $2.79 million and $2.95 million across three institutional rounds, with company trackers citing as many as 85 total investors including angels (Tracxn/Crunchbase-derived figures; the two totals disagree slightly and neither has been independently confirmed by Svami).
• August 2022: majority stake sold to Third Eye Distillery Holdings at a reported Rs 100 crore valuation — effectively an exit event for early backers rather than a fresh primary round, funded from Third Eye’s existing capital (M&A Critique).

How it makes money

Svami earns the way most branded packaged-beverage companies do: it manufactures bottled drinks and sells them at a premium to mass-market fizzy mixers, capturing margin on the gap between what a craft-positioned bottle can command and what commodity carbonated water costs to make. A few specifics from the public record:

• Products are priced and positioned as, in Bhasin’s words, “the first, easy upgrade” from mass brands like Schweppes and Coca-Cola, rather than as a mass-market challenger on price.
• Manufacturing stayed in-house rather than outsourced to third-party bottlers, which the founders have said protects recipe control and quality consistency but also caps how fast output can scale against demand spikes.
• Ready-to-drink cocktail mixers (gin and tonic, rum and cola, pink gin and tonic) made up about 20 percent of revenue as of the early-2020s product mix reported by Business India — a category Svami entered largely as a pandemic-era pivot toward at-home drinking.
• No gross margin, take-rate or unit economics have been published by the company or surfaced in the deal coverage reviewed for this piece; that detail is cut here rather than estimated.

The numbers

Unit: Rs crore. Figures are drawn from company disclosures reported by YourStory and Business India (FY21) and from Ministry of Corporate Affairs filings for Foxtrot Beverages Private Limited as tracked by Tracxn and TheCompanyCheck (FY22-FY23).

• FY21 revenue grew roughly 200 percent year-on-year, per YourStory’s September 2021 reporting, off a small base.
• FY22 to FY23 revenue fell roughly 40 percent, per Tracxn’s and TheCompanyCheck’s separate reads of the company’s MCA filings — a decline, not a plateau, in the same window the company was valued at Rs 100 crore.
• Separately, deal coverage from M&A Critique cited a company-stated FY22 revenue figure of $2 million with a $5 million FY23 target — substantially higher than the audited filings above. This piece follows the spec’s own preference for filings over founder or deal-press figures and flags rather than resolves the gap, since neither source could be independently reconciled.
• Net profit or loss has not been disclosed in any source reviewed; TheCompanyCheck’s own data pages mark this line as available only behind paid access, so it is left blank here rather than estimated.

Where the money comes from

• Retail (general and modern trade): about 70 percent of revenue, per Business India’s reported channel mix — the largest single source of sales, despite Svami’s brand identity being built around bars.
• HoReCa (hotels, restaurants, cafes and bars): about 20 percent of revenue (Business India) — smaller than retail, but the channel that built the brand’s premium credibility and the one hit hardest by the 2020 lockdowns.
• Online / e-commerce: about 10 percent of revenue (Business India).
• Geographic footprint: present in eight states and union territories as of late 2019, including Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Goa and Pune (India Entrepreneur), expanding to a reported 35 cities and roughly 2,500 retail and HoReCa touchpoints by early 2024 (Man’s World India), up from around 2,000 touchpoints and 30 distributors in 2021 (YourStory).
• Exports: Hong Kong from 2019 (India Entrepreneur), with Singapore, Maldives and Mauritius added by the time of the 2022 ownership change (M&A Critique).
• The surprise: a brand whose reputation was built pouring into cocktails at five-star bars draws most of its actual revenue from someone buying a bottle off a shelf to drink at home — retail, not HoReCa, is the larger channel by Business India’s reported split.

The risks

• Revenue-valuation mismatch: audited-style filings show revenue falling around 40 percent from Rs 7.0 crore (FY22) to Rs 4.2 crore (FY23), even as the company carried a Rs 100 crore price tag from its August 2022 sale (Tracxn; TheCompanyCheck; M&A Critique). A valuation set against a shrinking revenue base is a multiple that gets harder to defend if the trend does not reverse.
• Channel concentration in a cyclical trade: with roughly a fifth of revenue tied to HoReCa (Business India) and a brand identity built on bar culture, Svami’s demand is exposed to exactly the kind of on-trade shutdown it lived through in 2020, when the COVID-19 lockdowns closed the hotels and restaurants it depended on for visibility and volume.
• Strategic dependence on a single controlling shareholder: Third Eye Distillery Holdings holds a reported majority stake (51 percent per M&A Critique) and has stated ambitions to build a diversified “house of brands” around its core gin business. Svami’s growth capital and distribution access now run through a parent whose primary commercial interest is alcoholic spirits, not non-alcoholic mixers.
• A more crowded category than the one Svami entered: Tracxn’s competitor tracking ranks Svami 12th among 95 active companies it follows in the space, behind better-funded rivals such as CleanCo ($12.4 million raised) and Aplos ($10.5 million raised) — the premium-mixer white space Svami helped create in 2018 is no longer empty.

The takeaway

Svami’s story is a reminder that being first to name a category is not the same as owning its economics. The brand became the reference point for premium mixers in India years before its own revenue reflected that status — by 2024 it was still short of Rs 20 crore in sales, according to Man’s World India, even as it carried a Rs 100 crore valuation from a strategic buyer. What actually closed that gap was not organic growth; it was a larger, better-capitalised player in an adjacent category buying in for the brand, the distribution relationships and the credibility, and betting it could do more with those assets than the founders could alone. For any founder building a category-defining brand on thin absolute revenue, the lesson is not to distrust the valuation moment when it comes — it is to be honest, before that moment, about which parts of the story are proof and which parts are still promise.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded Svami and when?

Svami was founded by Aneesh Bhasin, Sahil Jatana and Rahul Mehra. The legal entity, Foxtrot Beverages Private Limited, was incorporated in May 2016, and the Svami brand itself reached the market in 2018, according to Tracxn and Man’s World India.

What does Svami sell?

Svami makes premium tonic waters, ginger ale, low- and no-sugar sodas, and ready-to-drink cocktail mixers such as gin and tonic and rum and cola, sold through retail, hotels and restaurants, and online.

Is Svami a listed company?

No. Svami, through its parent Foxtrot Beverages Private Limited, is a private company. It is not listed on any stock exchange.

What is Svami’s valuation?

Svami was valued at Rs 100 crore (about $10.4 million at $1 ≈ Rs 96.0, 18 September 2026) at the time of its August 2022 majority-stake sale, as reported by Man’s World India and M&A Critique. No more recent valuation has been publicly disclosed.

Who owns Svami now?

Third Eye Distillery Holdings, the company behind Stranger & Sons gin, has held a reported majority stake (51 percent, per M&A Critique) since August 2022. Co-founder Aneesh Bhasin continues to run the business day to day.

Sources

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

• Tracxn, Svami company profile, accessed September 2026
• TheCompanyCheck, Foxtrot Beverages Private Limited financial and registry data, accessed September 2026
• India Entrepreneur, “Beverage Brand Svami Raises INR 7.5 Cr, Eyes Rapid Expansion,” November 2019
• YourStory, “[Funding alert] FMCG startup Svami raises $1M in Pre-Series A round led by Rukam Capital Trust,” November 2019
• YourStory, “35 cities, 12 products, 2x revenue: How Svami created a market for premium mixers,” September 2021
• Man’s World India, “Aneesh Bhasin: More Than A Svami,” February 2024
• M&A Critique (mnacritique.mergersindia.com), “Third Eye Distillery takes controlling stake in Svami,” August 2022
• Bar & Bench, “Universal Legal acts on Third Eye Distillery Holdings acquiring Foxtrot Beverages,” August 2022
• Gin Foundry, interview with Aneesh Bhasin, Svami Tonic
• Business India, “Now, a 2 cal cola”
• Hotelier India, “Moet Hennessy India collaborates Svami to launch limited edition mixers”

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