Comet sells a sneaker for Rs 4,299 that it says matches the look and feel of a Rs 10,000 pair from a global brand — and in September 2026, investors backed that claim with a Rs 100 crore (~$10.4 million at $1 ≈ Rs 96.0, 18 September 2026, Trading Economics) Series B round. The same filings that confirm the round also show the company lost Rs 4.4 crore in the year before it, a loss that grew faster than its revenue did.
That contradiction — a brand growing fast enough to pull in marquee investors while burning more cash to do it — sits at the centre of Comet’s story. Founded in Bengaluru by two ex-Bain consultants who had never made a shoe, the direct-to-consumer sneaker label has gone from a single 15-SKU drop in July 2023 to a Rs 29.1 crore revenue base, ten retail stores and a reported Rs 535 crore valuation in a little over three years. What follows is what the public record — funding filings, disclosures reported by trade press, and the founders’ own interviews — actually supports about how it got there, and where the gaps are.
Quick facts
| Company | Comet (D2C sneaker and slides brand) |
| Founded | Conceptualised 2022; brand launched July 2023, Bengaluru |
| Founder(s) | Utkarsh Gupta (co-founder & CEO) and Dishant Daryani (co-founder) |
| Businesses | Direct-to-consumer sneakers and slides, sold via its own website and a growing chain of company-owned retail stores |
| Latest FY revenue | Rs 29.1 crore (FY25, year to March 2025) |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Net loss of Rs 4.4 crore (FY25) |
| Listed | Private |
| Market value/last valuation | Reported ~Rs 535 crore post-Series B (September 2026) |
| Key shareholders/CEO | Utkarsh Gupta (CEO); backed by Verlinvest, Elevation Capital, Nexus Venture Partners and angel investors including Abhiraj Singh Bhal and Anand Ahuja |
What they do
Comet designs and sells sneakers and slides under its own name, priced mostly around Rs 4,299 a pair, aimed at young, digitally-native Indian buyers who want design-led footwear without paying international sticker prices. The company builds its own soles and components rather than white-labelling, sells almost entirely direct — through its own website first, and increasingly through its own retail stores — and releases new designs as limited “drops” rather than running a standing catalogue of hundreds of styles, as per the founders’ own account of the model to Inc42 and Elevation Capital’s portfolio team.
The origin
Utkarsh Gupta and Dishant Daryani met as management consultants at Bain & Company before their paths split: Gupta went on to become chief of staff to Hotstar’s chief executive and helped launch Hotstar VIP before Disney’s acquisition of the streaming business, while Daryani moved through Urban Company in category and expansion roles and later spent a stint in venture capital at Accel, according to profiles of the pair published by Inc42 and Pitchkaro India. Gupta did his MBA at Kellogg School of Management in Chicago, where — by his own account — he became fascinated by how deeply American sneaker culture tied emotion to a product category that, in India, still meant either an expensive import or a forgettable local knockoff. “No one is telling stories through sneakers in India,” he told Inc42, arguing that Indian brands leaned on celebrity endorsement rather than product narrative because they lacked the marketing budgets to do otherwise. Daryani has described the founding ambition in similar terms to Startuppedia: “People do not want to wear logos, they want to wear meaning.” The insight that became the business was narrow and specific: no Indian brand occupied the Rs 4,000–5,000 band with real design credibility, and nobody was using storytelling — rather than discounting or celebrity faces — to sell a sneaker.
The struggle years
Two problems threatened the idea before it reached customers. The first was manufacturing. As Inc42 and Markhub24 both report, India’s footwear industry in 2022–23 was built for two things — cheap mass-market shoes and formal leather dress shoes — and had no real base of sneaker-specific manufacturing: no one who knew how to mould a modern cushioned sole or work with the synthetic uppers a sneaker needs. Gupta and Daryani’s response was to go and learn it themselves, spending time inside Chinese sneaker factories before returning to build the relationships and transfer the know-how to Indian contract manufacturers — a process that, per Inc42’s reporting on the brand’s product playbook, took seven to eight months before Comet had a sole system, later branded “SpaceWalk”, that could be built at home. Until that transfer was done, the company had no product to sell.
The second problem showed up later, in the numbers, and it has not gone away: Comet’s losses are widening even as revenue grows. Regulatory filings reported by Inc42 and Indian Retailer show the net loss went from Rs 2 crore in FY24 to Rs 4.4 crore in FY25 — a 120.6% increase — as stock purchases, advertising and staff costs all grew faster than the top line in percentage terms during the brand’s first full year of trading. Neither setback is a near-death event in the classic startup sense; nothing in the public record suggests Comet came close to shutting down. But both are documented, dated constraints the founders had to work through rather than founder folklore, and the second is a live one: the company is still spending well ahead of revenue to fund the growth investors are now underwriting.
The turning point
The clearest before-and-after in Comet’s record is the gap between its first product drop and its first institutional funding round. Comet launched in July 2023 with “Mango”, an 15-SKU collection built around the colour and memory of raw and ripe mangoes rather than around a logo or a celebrity — packaging included actual dried grass to complete the sensory idea, as the brand’s own retelling to Inc42 and Markhub24 describes it. The drop sold out; Markhub24 puts the sell-through at hours, and subsequent limited drops such as “Pataka” and “Jugnu” reportedly cleared in as little as fifteen minutes, per Inc42’s reporting. On one side of that moment: a company with a seed cheque, no institutional backer, and an unproven idea that a story-led, non-celebrity sneaker brand could work in India. On the other: within roughly nine months of trading, revenue of Rs 7.3 crore (FY24, per Inc42’s filing-based reporting; Startuppedia separately reports Rs 7.86 crore for the same period), and by July 2024 a Rs 42.3 crore Series A led by Elevation Capital — with Nexus Venture Partners and AngelList India also investing — at a post-money valuation of around Rs 167 crore, confirmed independently by both Inc42 and Startuppedia. The drops did not just sell shoes; they became the evidence that convinced institutional investors the model could scale beyond a hobby project.
The money behind it
- Seed (reported February 2023): An early round including Nexus Venture Partners, reported at roughly Rs 1.5 crore by Markhub24 — the smallest and least independently verified of Comet’s rounds, raised before the brand had shipped a single pair.
- Series A (July 2024): Rs 42.3 crore (~$5 million), led by Elevation Capital (Rs 33.36 crore) with Nexus Venture Partners (Rs 8.34 crore) and AngelList India (Rs 60 lakh) participating, at a post-money valuation of about Rs 167 crore — as per Inc42 and Startuppedia, both citing regulatory filings.
- Series B (announced 4 September 2026): Rs 100 crore (~$10.4 million), led by Belgium-based Verlinvest, with existing backers Elevation Capital and Nexus Venture Partners returning, plus angel investors Abhiraj Singh Bhal (co-founder and CEO, Urban Company), Ajit Mohan (global chief business officer, Snap Inc.) and Anand Ahuja (founder, Bhaane; co-founder, VegNonVeg) — confirmed by Entrackr, Business Standard, Storyboard18, SMEStreet, India Entrepreneur and D2C Insider Pulse.
- Total raised: Upward of Rs 143 crore across the two disclosed institutional rounds (Series A plus Series B), on top of the smaller seed round.
- Latest valuation: D2C Insider Pulse, citing share-issuance filings, reports a post-Series B valuation of about Rs 535 crore (~$56 million) — a 3.2x jump from the Rs 167 crore post-Series-A mark. No other outlet in this research independently published the same figure, so it is reported here as a single filing-derived estimate, not a confirmed, multiply-sourced number.
- What each backer changed: Nexus Venture Partners came in at seed and stayed through every round, giving continuity; Elevation Capital led the Series A that funded the shift from a single drop to a repeatable product and retail roadmap; Verlinvest’s Series B lead brought a growth-stage investor whose stated mandate — per Entrackr’s reporting on the round — is funding the leap from online drops to a nationwide store network.
How it makes money
Comet earns the way most direct-to-consumer footwear brands do: it sells shoes it designs and controls the manufacture of, at close to full retail price, without a wholesale middleman taking a cut on most of its volume.
- Money in: Sale of sneakers and slides at list prices mostly around Rs 4,299, sold overwhelmingly through Comet’s own website, supplemented by its own retail stores and a handful of curated multi-brand sneaker stores (Broadway in Delhi, Dawntown in Mumbai, Streat Junkies in Bengaluru), per Inc42’s reporting.
- Costs out: Stock-in-trade/product procurement was Comet’s single largest cost line in FY25 at Rs 18.5 crore (51.3% of total expenses), up 333.7% on FY24’s Rs 4.3 crore; advertising and sales promotion cost Rs 9.3 crore (up 246% on FY24’s Rs 2.7 crore); employee benefits cost Rs 5.1 crore, roughly 3.4 times FY24’s Rs 1.5 crore — all per Inc42’s reporting on the FY25 regulatory filing.
- Where the margin sits: By controlling design, sourcing and the sole-manufacturing process itself rather than outsourcing product development to a contract factory, and by selling direct instead of through wholesale or marketplaces such as Myntra, Comet keeps the margin a traditional multi-brand retailer or platform commission would otherwise absorb — the founders’ own framing, as reported by Pitchkaro India and Inc42, though the company has not published a gross margin percentage.
- The part people get wrong: The limited-drop model reads as a marketing gimmick, but per the founders’ account to Inc42, it began as a manufacturing constraint — a young brand with no purchasing scale could not compete with established players on volume, so it made volume irrelevant by deliberately capping inventory per style. Scarcity was a workaround before it became a strategy.
The numbers
Comet has only completed two fiscal years of trading since its July 2023 launch, so a longer multi-year run is not yet available in the public record; the figures below, both sourced from Inc42’s reporting on regulatory filings, are what exists.
| Metric (Rs crore) | FY24 | FY25 |
| Revenue from operations | 7.3 | 29.1 |
| Other income | — | 2.7 |
| Total expenses | 9.9 | 36.1 |
| Net loss | 2.0 | 4.4 |
- Revenue growth: up 303.6% in FY25 over FY24 (Inc42, citing the FY25 filing).
- Loss growth: up 120.6% in FY25 over FY24 — losses grew slower than revenue in percentage terms, even though the absolute loss more than doubled (Inc42).
- Post-Series-A run rate: Entrackr and India Entrepreneur both report revenue has grown “nine-fold” since the Series A round closed, which implies momentum has continued into the current, not-yet-filed financial year.
Where the money comes from
Comet does not publish a revenue split by channel or geography, so what follows is a description of its distribution footprint rather than a percentage breakdown — a gap worth naming rather than papering over.
- Primary channel: Comet’s own direct-to-consumer website, which the company and its investors describe as still the majority of sales (Inc42; Pitchkaro India).
- Retail stores: Ten Comet-owned stores as of September 2026, expanding to a targeted 20 by the end of FY27, starting with a Bengaluru flagship that opened in April 2025 ahead of planned Delhi and Mumbai openings (Entrackr, Storyboard18, SMEStreet, India Entrepreneur).
- Curated multi-brand retail: Select sneaker and lifestyle stores — Broadway (Delhi), Dawntown (Mumbai) and Streat Junkies (Bengaluru) — carry Comet alongside other brands (Inc42).
- Product range: Four footwear models on sale as of September 2026, with a roadmap to eight by the end of 2027 and a long-in-development women’s-specific model with its own sole tooling (Entrackr, SMEStreet).
- The surprise: a brand built on scarcity — deliberately limited drops that sell out in minutes — is now the same brand spending most of a fresh Rs 100 crore round on the least scarce possible expansion: physical stores that need to be stocked every day, not dropped once a month.
The risks
- Widening losses alongside growth: net loss grew 120.6% in FY25 to Rs 4.4 crore even as the company scaled, with stock purchases and advertising spend both growing faster in absolute terms than revenue (Inc42; Indian Retailer). Sustained fundraising, not operating cash flow, is currently financing growth.
- Crowding in the segment it created: Comet’s original insight — a design-led, story-driven sneaker between cheap local shoes and Rs 10,000-plus imports — is no longer uncontested; Inc42’s own analysis names Puma, Red Tape, Neeman’s, Yoho, Rare Rabbit and Solethreads as competitors already active in adjacent price bands, in a category Inc42 cites as worth $3.1 billion in India in 2025.
- Scarcity-to-scale tension: the drop model that built Comet’s brand depends on manufactured scarcity and waitlists; retail stores need standing stock every day. Equentis’s analysis of the brand frames this directly: “scaling while maintaining exclusivity remains one of the brand’s biggest ongoing challenges” — a mechanism risk, not a hypothetical one, as the company is actively executing the store rollout the Series B is meant to fund.
The takeaway
Comet’s most transferable lesson is not about sneakers. It is that a supply-chain gap — no Indian factory knew how to build a modern sneaker sole — can be a moat if a founder is willing to close it by hand rather than route around it with a compromise product. Gupta and Daryani did not import a cheaper factory relationship; they spent the better part of a year inside someone else’s factory learning a process nobody in India had, then brought it home. That patience, more than any drop’s Instagram virality, is what gave a two-person consulting-alumni team a sole system, a manufacturing base and a story no competitor could copy overnight. The risk they now carry is the mirror image of that strength: the same hands-on control that built the brand has to be handed off — to store managers, to a bigger supply chain, to a faster cadence — without losing what made the first drop sell out in the first place.
Frequently asked questions
What does Comet sell?
Comet is a Bengaluru-based direct-to-consumer brand that designs and sells its own sneakers and slides, mostly priced around Rs 4,299, through its website and its own retail stores.
Who founded Comet and when?
Utkarsh Gupta and Dishant Daryani, former Bain & Company colleagues, conceptualised Comet in 2022 and launched the brand in July 2023 in Bengaluru.
How much funding has Comet raised?
Comet has raised a reported seed round (around Rs 1.5 crore, per Markhub24), a Rs 42.3 crore Series A in July 2024 led by Elevation Capital, and a Rs 100 crore Series B announced on 4 September 2026 led by Verlinvest, with Elevation Capital and Nexus Venture Partners returning as investors.
Is Comet profitable?
No. Comet reported a net loss of Rs 4.4 crore in FY25, up from a Rs 2 crore loss in FY24, even as revenue nearly quadrupled to Rs 29.1 crore, according to regulatory filings reported by Inc42.
Where can you buy Comet sneakers?
Primarily on Comet’s own website, plus its own retail stores (ten as of September 2026, expanding toward 20 by the end of FY27) and select multi-brand stores such as Broadway in Delhi, Dawntown in Mumbai and Streat Junkies in Bengaluru.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ Rs 96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Inc42, “Comet’s FY25 Revenue Quadruples To INR 29 Cr”, September 2025
- Inc42, “Can Comet Stir Up A Sneaker Revolution With Its Storytelling Playbook?”, 2025
- Inc42, “[Update] Exclusive: D2C Sneaker Brand Comet Raises Series A Funding From Elevation Capital, Nexus”, July 2024
- Inc42, “D2C Sneaker Brand Comet Raises Rs 100 Cr Series B Funding”, September 2026
- Entrackr, “D2C sneaker brand Comet raises Rs 100 Cr in Series B led by Verlinvest”, September 2026
- Business Standard, “Sneaker startup Comet raises 100 crore in Series B led by Verlinvest”, September 2026
- Storyboard18, “Comet raises Rs 100 Cr in Series B funding led by Verlinvest, eyes 20 stores by FY27”, September 2026
- SMEStreet, “Comet Raises Rs 100 Cr in Series B round, Led by Verlinvest, Gears Up for a Bigger India Footprint”, September 2026
- India Entrepreneur, “Comet Raises INR 100 Cr in Series B Round Led by Verlinvest”, September 2026
- Indian Startup News, “Sneaker brand Comet raises Rs 100 crore to expand retail network and develop new footwear”, September 2026
- D2C Insider Pulse, “Comet Raises Rs 98.75 Cr in Series B at 3.2X Valuation”, September 2026
- Indian Retailer, “Comet Accelerates Growth with 303 Pc Revenue Jump in FY25”, September 2025
- Startuppedia, “‘People do not want to wear logos, they want to wear meaning,’ Co-founders of An Indian Sneaker Brand That’s Worth Rs 167 Cr in just 2 Years”, 2025
- Pitchkaro India, “How Utkarsh Gupta And Dishant Daryani Built Comet Into A New-Age Indian Sneaker Brand”, 2025
- Markhub24, “India Had Sneaker Lovers But No Sneaker Culture — Until Comet Changed Everything”, 2025
- Equentis, “From Startup to 29 Crore Revenue: How Comet Became India’s Fastest Rising Sneaker Brand”, 2025
- Elevation Capital, “Comet’s Mission To Rewrite India’s Sneaker Story” (podcast page), 2025
- Elevation Capital, portfolio page for Comet, 2025
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