Startup Deep Dive : Jimmy’s Cocktails — Revenue fell 31% in FY24, then the company said it turned profitable

In FY24, Jimmy’s Cocktails watched its revenue fall 30.9% to ₹23.7 crore even as its founder told the press, in the same financial year, that the company had turned profitable. A brand built to own “the other 75% of the glass” — everything in a cocktail that isn’t the spirit — has spent six years proving that a category can be invented in India, and two of those years proving how hard it is to hold onto.

Jimmy’s Cocktails is the low-calorie mixer and sparkling-mixer brand from Gurugram-based Radiohead Brands, founded by Ankur Bhatia and Nitin Bhardwaj in September 2019. It sells ready-to-pour cocktail bases — whiskey sour, mango chilli mojito, cosmopolitan, tonic water, soda — meant to be mixed at home with whisky, gin, vodka or rum. It has raised money from Paytm’s Vijay Shekhar Sharma, HDFC’s Keki Mistry and Mamaearth’s Varun Alagh among others, reached a reported valuation of ₹212 crore (about $2.2 million, at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026, Trading Economics), and is now betting its next act on energy drinks.

Quick facts

What they do

Jimmy’s Cocktails sells the part of a cocktail that isn’t the alcohol: bottled mixers, syrups and sparkling bases such as whiskey sour, sex on the beach, mango chilli mojito, cosmopolitan, tonic water, soda and ginger ale, sold at roughly ₹99 for a 250ml bottle. The customer pours in their own whisky, gin, vodka or rum; Jimmy’s supplies everything else in the glass. Since 2024 the parent company, Radiohead Brands, has widened into a second category with the Hustle energy drink, sold in 250ml cans at ₹60, positioning the group as a multi-beverage house rather than a single-product mixer brand. The buyer is the at-home drinker rather than the bar: someone who wants a bar-quality pour without a bartender, bought off a retail shelf, a liquor-adjacent kiosk, or the brand’s own website.

The origin

Ankur Bhatia spent years inside the world he would later compete against: as brand manager for Teacher’s Scotch Whisky and marketing controller for the core and Scotch portfolio at Beam Suntory, before a stint running marketing for Mahindra’s electric vehicles. Nitin Bhardwaj came from the other side of the bar cart, heading north-zone sales for Red Bull in India after stints at Cadbury and Marico. The idea, as Bhatia has told it, arrived after a late night out in Mumbai: the drink at an upscale Bandra bar tasted markedly better than the same spirit poured at home, and the gap wasn’t the whisky, gin or vodka — spirits are typically only about a quarter of what’s in the glass. The rest is soda, tonic, syrup and juice, and almost none of it was sold as a considered, branded product in India. Bhatia named the company Jimmy’s specifically to sit alongside the whisky names it would never compete with directly — Johnny Walker, Jack Daniel’s, Jim Beam — borrowing the familiarity of the “J” without touching the liquor licence the mixer itself didn’t need.

The struggle years

The company piloted in September 2019 the way most FMCG brands do: one shop at a time, starting with a betel and cigarette counter, Sanjay Paan Bhandaar, positioned directly opposite a premium liquor store in Gurugram, on the logic that anyone buying a bottle would walk past the mixer. A wider offline retail launch was planned for March 2020. It never happened. The national COVID-19 lockdown landed in the same month, closing the bars and liquor stores the whole distribution plan depended on, and the company had no online storefront built to fall back on.

The second crisis arrived years later and looked nothing like the first. In the financial year ended March 2024, revenue fell 30.9% to ₹23.7 crore from ₹34.3 crore in FY23, according to regulatory filings reported by Inc42 and Snackfax. The net loss widened 47.1% to ₹10 crore from ₹6.8 crore, and the EBITDA loss jumped to ₹13 crore, pushing the EBITDA margin to a negative 55% from a negative 25% a year earlier. The uncomfortable part is the timing: in the very same financial year, Restaurant India quoted the company describing itself as having “achieved profitability in FY’24” while announcing its move into energy drinks — a claim the audited numbers, as reported, do not support.

The turning point

With the offline plan dead on arrival, the founders rebuilt the company as a direct-to-consumer brand almost overnight, officially relaunching online in July 2020 with a “bring the bar home” campaign aimed at people stuck at home with closed bars and a bottle of spirits going flat with plain soda. It worked on a scale the original retail pilot never would have tested. Bottle sales went from roughly 70,000 units in the April–June 2020 quarter to more than 350,000 units in the same quarter a year later, a five-fold jump, according to Forbes India. Retail distribution, rebuilt from the pandemic low, tripled from about 1,000 to 3,000 stores over the same stretch, and website orders grew to make up around 35% of total orders. A partnership with Shiprocket, struck in August 2020, is credited by Inc42 with a 400% rise in D2C order volumes in the months that followed. The lockdown that should have killed the launch instead forced the company into the channel — D2C — that ended up defining it.

The money behind it

• Seed, 2020: ₹2.5 crore raised just before the COVID-19 lockdown (Entrepreneur India, March 2021).
• Pre-Series A bridge, March 2021: ₹6 crore from Vinay Agarwal (First State Stewart Asia) and Keki Mistry (Vice Chairman & CEO, HDFC Ltd) — both repeat investors from the seed round (Entrepreneur India; Hotelier India, March 2021).
• Pre-Series A, April 2022: ₹14 crore (about $1.8 million) led by Roots Ventures, with 7Square Ventures, Shiprocket co-founder Vishesh Khurana, Mamaearth co-founder Varun Alagh, Keki Mistry, T&T Motors chairman Vidur Talwar and CLSA’s Anirudh Somani participating; the company said the round lifted its valuation 2.5x (Entrackr; Jimmy’s Cocktails company release, April 2022).
• Extended Pre-Series A, July–December 2023: a combined ₹35 crore, closing in tranches — about ₹11 crore ($1.3 million) in July 2023 from Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma and lead investor Prath Ventures, followed by ₹12.2 crore in December 2023 from Prath Ventures, Capital Ventures, Illeyrium Ventures and angel investors Neel Bahl and Droom’s Sandeep Aggarwal. The company told the press its valuation had tripled over the prior year and risen 20-fold since founding (Entrackr; Vygr News; SiliconIndia, 2023).

Put together, the four disclosed rounds add up to roughly ₹57.5 crore raised from named backers between 2020 and 2023. Third-party trackers put the cumulative total higher and inconsistently — Tracxn cites about $6 million and a post-money valuation of ₹212 crore as of 12 January 2024, while other aggregators list figures between $6 million and $8.5 million — a spread that is common when rupee tranches raised over several years are converted at different exchange rates and re-totalled; this piece uses the disclosed rupee amounts above as the more reliable figure. What each lead investor changed: Roots Ventures’ 2022 cheque funded the jump from roughly 6,000 to a stated target of 25,000 retail outlets; Prath Ventures’ 2023 backing coincided with the push into 20,000+ outlets across 50-plus cities and, later, the funding of the Hustle energy-drink launch.

How it makes money

The business is a straightforward FMCG margin play sitting next to a much bigger, regulated category it deliberately avoids touching. Jimmy’s never holds a liquor licence and never sells alcohol; it sells the mixer, syrup and soda that go around the spirit, which keeps it out of India’s surrogate-advertising restrictions and lets it advertise openly where whisky and vodka brands cannot.

• Money in: retail sales through general trade, modern trade, wine shops and bars (roughly three-quarters of monthly volume per 2020–21 reporting), plus direct sales via drinkjimmys.com and marketplaces, which the company said made up about 35% of orders by mid-2021 (Forbes India, 2021; Inc42, 2021).
• Costs out: raw materials (glass bottles, syrups, concentrate) were ₹8.1 crore in FY24, down 39.6% year-on-year; employee costs were ₹8.9 crore in FY24 and ₹8.1 crore in FY25; advertising and sales promotion ran to ₹11.4 crore in FY25 — a large slice of total spend for a company still running at a loss (Inc42/Snackfax, March 2025; Startuppedia, 2025).
• Where the margin sits: the company has not published a per-bottle margin, but FY25 filings show it spent ₹1.25 for every ₹1 of revenue earned, an improvement from ₹1.56 in FY24 — the unit economics are moving the right way but have not yet crossed into profit (Startuppedia, 2025).
• The part people get wrong: press coverage of the December 2023 funding round quoted FY23 “gross revenue” at ₹80 crore (SiliconIndia; Vygr News, 2023), a figure roughly 2.3 times the ₹34.3 crore FY23 operating revenue that later appeared in the company’s own regulatory filings, as reported by Inc42 and Snackfax. The gap is almost certainly gross billed sales versus audited net revenue — a distinction founder interviews routinely blur and this piece treats the audited, filing-based figure as the reliable one.

The numbers

Figures below are Radiohead Brands’ operating/total revenue and net loss as reported from regulatory filings, unit: ₹ crore.

• FY23 → FY24: revenue fell 30.9% and net loss widened 47.1% (Inc42; Snackfax, March 2025).
• FY24 → FY25: total revenue recovered 29% year-on-year to ₹34.2 crore, essentially back to FY23 levels, while net loss narrowed 23% to ₹7.7 crore (Startuppedia, 2025).
• Spend efficiency: total expenditure fell from ₹43.9 crore (FY23) to ₹40.4 crore (FY24) before rising again to ₹42 crore (FY25) as advertising spend increased (Inc42/Snackfax; Startuppedia, 2025).

Where the money comes from

• Channel split (2020–21): offline retail accounted for about 75% of monthly bottle volume, with the remaining 25% split roughly evenly between the company’s own website and online marketplaces (Inc42, 2021).
• Geography (2022): around 40% of revenue came from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, a segment the company specifically cited when raising its April 2022 round (Entrepreneur India/Inc42, 2022).
• Retail footprint growth: from roughly 1,000 stores (2020) to 3,000 (2021) to 6,000-plus FMCG outlets by April 2022 and a stated 20,000-plus outlets and bars across 50-plus cities by mid-to-late 2023 (Forbes India; Entrackr; Entrackr, 2023).
• Exports: physical retail sales into Australia, South Africa, Nepal and Mauritius, alongside the domestic D2C footprint of 400-plus cities (Inc42, 2021).
• The surprise: a single-SKU mixer brand launched into a market most people assumed was too small to support a standalone company; Restaurant India cited the Indian club soda and mixer market at roughly ₹2,000 crore, growing about 12% a year, and reported the company’s own view that it holds a clear lead within it — a claim made by the company that this piece could not independently verify against a second source and has therefore not treated as confirmed.

The risks

• The profitability the numbers don’t show. The company told Restaurant India it was profitable in FY24; regulatory filings reported the same fiscal year closing with a ₹10 crore net loss and a negative 55% EBITDA margin (Restaurant India, July 2024; Inc42/Snackfax, March 2025). Whatever the explanation — a different profitability measure, a later restatement — investors and buyers relying on founder commentary alone would have had the wrong picture for a full year.
• Revenue volatility in a single-category business. A 30.9% single-year revenue drop (FY23 to FY24) in a company with one core product line shows how exposed the business is to distribution churn or demand shifts before the newer energy-drink line has scale to diversify against it (Inc42/Snackfax, March 2025).
• Manufacturing concentration. The company has operated out of an exclusive production facility in Nashik since 2021; a single-site supply chain is a standard FMCG vulnerability to disruption, and no second facility has been publicly disclosed (Restaurant India, July 2024).
• Category crowding at the low end. Competing mixer brands — Swizzle, Sober, Catwalk Botanics, Sepoy and Co, Svami — have multiplied since 2019, and Jimmy’s own move into sparkling mixers and energy drinks suggests the founders see the original mixer-only category as no longer enough on its own (Tracxn, accessed September 2026).

The takeaway

Jimmy’s Cocktails is a reminder that inventing a category and defending one are different jobs. Spotting the “75% of the glass” nobody was selling as a branded product got the company its pilot shelf space and, later, its investors. But the harder work has been the part that gets no press release: reconciling what founders say about profitability with what the filings show, and proving that a five-year-old, single-category D2C brand can grow without the kind of year-on-year swings — a 30.9% revenue drop followed by a 29% recovery inside two fiscal years — that make a business hard to underwrite. The lesson transfers beyond mixers: a genuine white-space insight buys a company its first few years; discipline in the numbers is what buys the years after that.

Frequently asked questions

What does Jimmy’s Cocktails actually sell?

Bottled, ready-to-pour cocktail mixers, syrups and sparkling bases — such as whiskey sour, mango chilli mojito, cosmopolitan, tonic water and soda — meant to be combined at home with whisky, gin, vodka or rum that the customer already owns.

Who founded Jimmy’s Cocktails and when?

Ankur Bhatia and Nitin Bhardwaj founded the company in September 2019 in Gurugram, under parent entity Radiohead Brands Private Limited. Bhatia previously worked in brand marketing at Beam Suntory and Mahindra; Bhardwaj came from sales leadership roles at Red Bull, Cadbury and Marico.

How much has Jimmy’s Cocktails raised, and who backed it?

Disclosed rounds add up to roughly ₹57.5 crore across a 2020 seed round, a March 2021 bridge, an April 2022 Pre-Series A and an extended Pre-Series A closed between July and December 2023. Named backers include Prath Ventures, Roots Ventures, Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, HDFC’s Keki Mistry, Mamaearth’s Varun Alagh and Droom’s Sandeep Aggarwal.

Is Jimmy’s Cocktails profitable?

Not according to its regulatory filings. FY25 closed with a net loss of ₹7.7 crore, an improvement on FY24’s ₹10 crore loss, but still a loss; this is despite a company statement in mid-2024 describing FY24 as a profitable year.

What is Jimmy’s Cocktails worth today, and is it listed?

It is privately held. Tracxn reported a post-money valuation of ₹212 crore (about $2.2 million at current rates) as of 12 January 2024; no more recent valuation has been publicly disclosed as of September 2026.

Sources

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

• Forbes India, “The right mix at the right place” (2021)
• Business Today, “Cocktail mixer start-up Jimmy’s Cocktails eyes Rs 100 crore turnover” (20 May 2021)
• Entrepreneur India, “Beverages Startup Jimmy’s Raises INR 6 Cr In Pre-Series Round” (March 2021)
• Hotelier India, “Beverage start-up Jimmy’s Cocktails raises INR 6 crore in pre-series funding” (March 2021)
• Entrackr, “Jimmy’s Cocktails raises Rs 14 Cr in pre-Series A” (April 2022)
• Jimmy’s Cocktails / drinkjimmys.com, company funding announcement, Roots Ventures round (April 2022)
• Inc42, “Jimmy’s Cocktails raises funding to take omnichannel approach for expansion” (April 2022)
• Inc42, “How Jimmy’s Cocktails’ D2C pivot helped it build brand stickiness & aim $3 Mn revenue in FY22” (2021)
• Entrackr, “Jimmy’s Cocktails extends pre-Series A led by Prath Ventures” (July 2023)
• SiliconIndia, “Jimmy’s Cocktails Secures $3 Million in Extended Pre-Series A Funding Led by Prath Ventures” (2023)
• SiliconIndia, “Jimmy’s Cocktails Creator Raises Rs 35 Crore in Pre-Series A Funding” (2023)
• Vygr News, “Jimmy’s Cocktails Parent Company Secures ₹35 Crore in Pre-Series A Funding Round” (December 2023)
• Jimmy’s Cocktails / drinkjimmys.com, “Radiohead Brands expands portfolio, transforms into a multi-beverage brands company, launches Hustle Energy Drink” (2023)
• Restaurant India, “Jimmy’s Cocktails Profitable in FY’24, Expands into Energy Drinks” (15 July 2024)
• Inc42, “Jimmy’s Cocktails’ Revenue Dips 31% To INR 23.7 Cr In FY24” (March 2025)
• Snackfax, “Jimmy’s Cocktails Sees 30.9% Revenue Crash To INR 23.7 Cr In FY24, Net Loss Soars 47.1% To INR 10 Cr” (22 March 2025)
• Startuppedia, “Founded by Ex-Mahindra and Ex-Red Bull Executives, Beverage Brand Jimmy’s Cocktail Hits Rs 34.2 Crore Revenue in FY25” (2025)
• Tracxn, Jimmy’s Cocktails company profile, funding, and shareholding pages (accessed September 2026)

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