Startup Deep Dive : Airblack — it survived covid by pivoting to beauty education, then revenue fell 27%

Airblack began life as a travel booking startup. Then covid-19 grounded travel worldwide, and it very nearly grounded the company with it — until its founders rebuilt the business around something nobody had asked them to sell: live online classes in eyeliner technique and cake icing.

By June 2021, that pivot had pulled in $5.2 million (₹41 crore at today’s rate, $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026, Trading Economics) from Info Edge Ventures and Elevation Capital, two of India’s more selective early-stage investors. Three years later, the company that beauty education built is smaller than it was: FY24 revenue fell 27.0% to ₹6.8 crore from ₹9.3 crore in FY23, even after a fresh ₹33 crore round led by the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation. The rest of this piece is about how a company can win the pivot and still lose the plot on growth.

Quick facts

What they do

Airblack runs live, instructor-led online and hybrid courses under the “Beauty Club” brand, teaching practical beauty and culinary skills — makeup application, hairstyling, nail art and baking — to people who want to turn a hobby into an income rather than collect a certificate for a resume. Its learners are overwhelmingly women, many outside India’s biggest cities, who use the courses to become freelance makeup artists, home-salon operators, content creators or small culinary entrepreneurs. The company has said its courses are aligned with India’s Beauty & Wellness Sector Skill Council and the Skill India framework, and by December 2023 it counted more than 35,000 students drawn from over 300 cities across India and the UAE.

The origin

Videt Jaiswal, Vaibhav Raj Gupta and Pulkit Pujara started Airblack in Gurugram in 2019 — not as an education company, but as a travel booking business. Elevation Capital backed that first idea with a $1.5 million seed round in April 2019. The founding insight that eventually reshaped the company had nothing to do with travel: Jaiswal later described watching the creator economy take shape on Instagram and YouTube and concluding that “the Instagram and YouTube revolution has made people aware that there are hundreds of ways to earn a livelihood.” The bet, once the company changed direction, was that a practical skill taught live, in a fraction of the time and cost of a traditional diploma, could be the on-ramp into that new kind of livelihood — particularly for women who had no interest in, or access to, a conventional beauty school.

The struggle years

The first real test came almost immediately. Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020 collapsed travel and tourism demand overnight, and Airblack’s original travel-booking business had no obvious way to survive it — this was the near-death moment, and it happened within a year of the company banking its seed round. The founders responded by abandoning travel altogether and rebuilding the company around live “do-it-together” beauty classes, a pivot completed inside 2020 while most of the travel industry was still waiting for bookings to return.

The second setback was slower and less visible: somewhere after the founding, Pulkit Pujara stepped away from day-to-day involvement. Tracxn’s company-filings tracker lists him as a co-founder who is “no longer active” in the business, leaving Jaiswal and Gupta to run the company through its later fundraising and growth phase. The third strain shows up in the numbers rather than the narrative — after growing through 2021, revenue fell 27.0% in FY24 to ₹6.8 crore from ₹9.3 crore the year before, even as the company had just closed a new funding round. A pivot that saved the company from covid did not, on its own, guarantee it a growth curve.

The turning point

The clearest before-and-after in Airblack’s history sits either side of its Series A. Before: a travel startup with its core business erased by covid-19 travel bans in 2020, surviving on a $1.5 million seed cheque from 2019. After: by June 2021, the reinvented beauty-education business had signed up more than 25,000 learners across upwards of 500 cities, enough traction to raise $5.2 million co-led by Info Edge Ventures and Elevation Capital, with participation from Atelier Ventures and angel backers including CRED founder Kunal Shah and Meesho co-founder Vidit Aatrey. The jump — from a $1.5 million seed round to a $5.2 million Series A inside roughly two years, with two of India’s more selective consumer-tech investors both re-upping and co-leading — is the moment the pivot stopped being a survival move and started looking like a real business to outside capital.

The money behind it

• Seed — April 2019: $1.5 million led by Elevation Capital, raised while Airblack was still a travel-booking company.
• Series A — June 2021: $5.2 million co-led by Info Edge Ventures and Elevation Capital, with Atelier Ventures and angel investors including Kunal Shah and Vidit Aatrey; funded expansion of “Beauty Club” and new course categories.
• Pre-Series B — December 2023: $4 million (about ₹33 crore) led by the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation (₹16.32 crore), with Elevation Capital and Info Edge Ventures each putting in ₹6.33 crore, and further participation from Blume Ventures, the Thadani family and the Pawar Family Trust. The round landed after a 17-month gap without fresh capital.
• Total raised to date: roughly $10.7-11 million across three rounds (Inc42; Entrackr).
• Reported valuation: about ₹190 crore (~$23 million) post-money as of the December 2023 round, per TheKredible’s estimate, cited by both DealStreetAsia and Indian Startup News.
• What each backer changed: Elevation Capital’s seed cheque funded the original travel product and then bridged the pivot; Info Edge Ventures’ Series A co-lead brought consumer-internet distribution discipline to a company scaling live cohorts for the first time; the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation’s 2023 lead — its first in the round — pointed the company toward livelihood-linked, skilling-outcome metrics rather than pure course-completion numbers, consistent with the foundation’s focus on economic mobility.
• No new institutional round has been publicly reported since December 2023 — close to three years as of September 2026, based on the funding coverage reviewed for this piece.

How it makes money

Airblack earns by selling seats in live, cohort-based courses rather than pre-recorded video libraries — learners pay to join a scheduled “Beauty Club” batch taught by an in-house panel of experts, sometimes supplemented by guest sessions from working makeup artists. The pitch to a learner is speed and cost relative to a traditional diploma: a practical skill in weeks, not years, aimed at someone who wants to start earning rather than collect a credential. From 2023 the company began layering hybrid, in-person learning centres — funded partly out of the pre-Series B round — on top of the online model in ten cities, moving part of its delivery, and presumably part of its cost base, offline.

• Money in: course fees for live, scheduled cohorts across beauty, makeup, hairstyling, nail art and baking/cooking categories, supplemented by any certification or accreditation-linked fees tied to its Beauty & Wellness Sector Skill Council alignment.
• Costs out: instructor and guest-expert fees for live delivery (a structurally more expensive model than pre-recorded content), plus, from 2023, the fixed costs of physical hybrid centres in ten cities.
• What’s not public: Airblack has not disclosed per-course pricing, a take rate, or a split between online and hybrid-centre revenue in any filing or interview reviewed for this piece — those figures are cut here rather than estimated.
• The part people get wrong: this reads as a content or video business from the outside, but the live, scheduled, small-batch format means its cost structure sits closer to a services business than a scalable digital-product one, which is one reason revenue has not scaled in a straight line with learner numbers.

The numbers

Unit: ₹ crore. Figures as disclosed in regulatory filings and reported by Inc42 and Entrackr; only two fiscal years carry a publicly reported profit/loss figure in the sources reviewed, so the table is left blank rather than estimated where data is missing.

• FY23 revenue: ₹9.3 crore, against a net loss of ₹20.1 crore — meaning the company spent roughly ₹2.20 for every ₹1 of revenue it booked that year (Entrackr, December 2023, citing regulatory filings).
• FY24 revenue: ₹6.8 crore, down 27.0% year-on-year from FY23’s ₹9.3 crore (Inc42 company filings tracker).
• FY22 and FY25 figures: not found in any filing-based source reviewed for this piece and are therefore omitted rather than estimated.

Where the money comes from

Airblack does not publish a revenue split by course category or geography, so this section states only what is verifiable about its reach and mix, rather than inventing a percentage breakdown.

• Course categories: makeup and beauty (the original and still-lead vertical), hairstyling, nail art, and baking/culinary skills — a broader spread than the “makeup learning platform” label most coverage uses.
• Geographic reach: learners drawn from more than 300 cities across India, plus a UAE presence, as of the company’s December 2023 funding disclosures (Indian Startup News; Clay).
• Delivery mix: primarily live online cohorts since the 2020 pivot, with hybrid physical learning centres added in ten cities from late 2023 onward — a shift toward in-person delivery in at least some markets rather than a purely online model.
• The surprise: despite a national and even cross-border footprint by city count, revenue moved in the wrong direction in FY24 — reach did not translate into growth that year, which is the gap the company’s hybrid-centre bet was presumably meant to close.

The risks

• Revenue is shrinking, not just slowing: FY24 revenue fell 27.0% to ₹6.8 crore from ₹9.3 crore in FY23 (Inc42, citing filings) — a contraction, not a deceleration, in the most recent year with public numbers.
• Losses were already large relative to revenue before the decline: the FY23 net loss of ₹20.1 crore was more than double that year’s ₹9.3 crore revenue (Entrackr), meaning the business was burning at more than 2x revenue even in its better year — a ratio that a 27% revenue drop the following year would only worsen unless costs fell in step.
• Capital has not followed the 2023 round: no new institutional funding round has been publicly reported since the December 2023 pre-Series B, a near three-year gap as of September 2026, in a niche (consumer vocational skilling) where several peers have also struggled to raise follow-on capital.
• Founder continuity: Tracxn’s filings tracker lists co-founder Pulkit Pujara as no longer active in the company, leaving a smaller founding team to manage the post-pivot business through a period of declining revenue.

The takeaway

The lesson in Airblack’s story is not “pivot when your market disappears” — that part is close to obvious once covid-19 erased the travel business overnight. It is that a pivot which finds product-market fit fast enough to survive is not the same thing as one that has found a durable growth engine. Airblack solved its near-death problem in 2020, proved the new model had enough traction to raise a Series A from serious investors by mid-2021, and kept raising capital through 2023 — three real achievements. But three years after its founding pivot, revenue was smaller than it had been the year before, not larger. Surviving the moment that kills your original business is a different skill from building the one that grows for a decade, and the gap between the two is exactly where Airblack sits as of its most recent disclosed numbers.

Frequently asked questions

What does Airblack do?

Airblack runs live, cohort-based online and hybrid courses in beauty, makeup, hairstyling, nail art and baking under its “Beauty Club” brand, aimed at helping learners — mostly women — turn a practical skill into freelance work, a home salon or a small culinary business.

Who founded Airblack, and when?

Videt Jaiswal, Vaibhav Raj Gupta and Pulkit Pujara founded the company in Gurugram in 2019, originally as a travel booking startup, before pivoting to beauty and skilling education in 2020. Tracxn’s filings tracker lists Pujara as no longer active in the business.

How much funding has Airblack raised, and from whom?

Airblack has raised roughly $10.7-11 million across three rounds: a $1.5 million seed from Elevation Capital in April 2019, a $5.2 million Series A co-led by Info Edge Ventures and Elevation Capital in June 2021, and a $4 million (about ₹33 crore) pre-Series B led by the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation in December 2023.

Is Airblack profitable?

No. The company reported a net loss of ₹20.1 crore in FY23 against ₹9.3 crore in revenue. FY24 revenue fell further, to ₹6.8 crore, and a corresponding FY24 profit/loss figure was not found in public filings reviewed for this piece.

What happened to Airblack’s original travel business?

It was effectively wiped out when covid-19 lockdowns collapsed travel and tourism demand in 2020. The founders shut that model down and rebuilt the company around live beauty and skilling courses, the business it operates as today.

Sources

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

• Inc42, company financial filings tracker for Airblack, September 2026
• Inc42, “Airblack Rakes In $4 Mn Funding To Fortify Its Beauty & Makeup Learning Platform”, December 2023
• Inc42, “Creator Learning Platform Airblack Raises $5.2 Mn From Info Edge, Elevation Capital”, June 2021
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: Airblack raises new money led by Dell Foundation”, December 2023
• DealStreetAsia, “India: Airblack raises $5.2m funding from Info Edge Ventures, Elevation Capital”, June 2021
• Indian Startup News, “Skilling platform Airblack raises Rs 33 crore led by Micheal & Susan Dell Foundation, existing investors”, December 2023
• Business Standard, “Airblack raises $5.2 mn funding from Info Edge Ventures, Elevation Capital”, June 2021
• Startup Story Media, “Airblack Raises $5.2 Million Funding By Info Edge Ventures And Elevation Capital”, June 2021
• Airblack company blog, “Airblack raises $5.2 million from Info Edge Ventures, Elevation Capital”, June 2021
• Clay, company dossier for Airblack, funding and reach data, 2026
• Tracxn, company profile for Airblack — founders, funding rounds and headcount, 2026

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