Startup Deep Dive : RENEE Cosmetics — the makeup brand built on Beardo’s playbook that still hasn’t turned a profit

RENÉE Cosmetics closed the year ending March 2026 with ₹440 crore ($45.8 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026, Trading Economics) in operating revenue, founder Ashutosh Valani told Inc42 in June 2026 — a more than fourfold jump from the ₹97.15 crore the company reported for FY23. In the same breath, the Ahmedabad-based makeup brand has not made a rupee of profit in any of those years.

That contradiction sits at the centre of the RENÉE story. It was built by two men who had already sold one company for an estimated ₹350-400 crore, merged with an actress whose own brand was struggling to get off the ground, and then relaunched into the teeth of a pandemic. Five funding rounds and a $200 million valuation later, the losses have narrowed but not closed. This piece traces how a niche eyelash label became one of India’s most recognised new-age beauty brands — and why recognition alone has not been enough to make it profitable.

Quick facts

What they do

RENÉE Cosmetics sells colour cosmetics — lipsticks, eyeliners, foundations, blushes — alongside skincare, fragrance and nail products, positioned as “mass-premium”: priced above mass-market drugstore brands but below prestige counters, and aimed chiefly at Gen Z and millennial Indian women shopping online and in small-format retail. The company reports that 200+ SKUs move across its own website, e-commerce marketplaces, quick-commerce apps and roughly 25,000 offline touchpoints, including shop-in-shop counters inside larger retail chains (Inc42, June 2026).

The origin

Aashka Goradia Goble, a television actress, began experimenting with makeup formulations around 2018 and launched a line under her own name — “Rene by Aashka Goradia” — the following year, starting narrowly with false eyelashes (Inc42, February 2025). She could design product; she could not build distribution. At the same time, Ashutosh Valani and Priyank Shah were sitting on the other side of that problem. The pair had built Beardo, a men’s grooming brand, from roughly ₹3 crore of initial investment into a business Marico first bought 45% of in 2017 and then fully acquired in 2020, in a deal Entrackr estimated at ₹350-400 crore — about 3.5 to 4.5 times Beardo’s FY20 revenue of ₹80 crore (Entrackr, July 2020). Each founder held about 22% and walked away with an estimated ₹150-180 crore.

In 2020, with the Beardo exit closing, Valani and Shah reconnected with Goradia. She had the product instinct and a public profile; they had just proven they could scale a founder-led personal-care brand to a nine-figure exit. The three merged their ventures, rebranded as RENÉE — derived from the Latin “Renatus”, meaning born-again — and relaunched with a broader catalogue built around multi-functional products such as the five-shade “Fab 5” lipstick, designed to differentiate from single-shade incumbents (Inc42, February 2025).

The struggle years

The founding insight was sound; the execution nearly wasn’t. Two documented setbacks mark the early years.

• Pre-2020: Goradia’s solo venture “Rene by Aashka Goradia” struggled to move beyond its narrow eyelash line and could not build the distribution needed to scale — the problem the Valani-Shah merger was explicitly designed to solve (Inc42, February 2025).
• September 2020: the relaunch as RENÉE landed in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, disrupting retail and complicating the supply chain in the same window the brand needed to establish itself (Inc42, February 2025).
• 2020: the pandemic also exposed a dependency on international vendors for components and packaging; the company has described a subsequent pivot toward domestic, “Make in India” sourcing to shorten delivery cycles and reduce that exposure (StartupTalky, November 2024).

The turning point

The turning point was the 2020 merger and relaunch itself, and the numbers on either side of it are stark. Before it, Goradia’s standalone label was a single-category eyelash brand with no meaningful scale or distribution. After it, under the combined RENÉE structure, the company said it was generating roughly ₹1 crore a month in revenue by 2021 (StartupTalky, November 2024) — the base from which operating revenue climbed to ₹97.15 crore by FY23 and then to ₹191.65 crore by FY24, a 97.3% jump in a single year (Entrackr, November 2024). What had been a founder’s side-project became, within three fiscal years of the relaunch, a brand doing business with 650-plus shop-in-shop counters (Entrackr, November 2024).

The money behind it

RENÉE has raised money in five identifiable priced rounds since 2021, moving from a Mensa Brands-backed Series A to a growth round led by a dedicated late-stage investor four years later.

• Series A, 2022: $10 million led by Mensa Brands, with Equanimity Ventures and 100Unicorns (Inc42, February 2025).
• Series B, 2022: $25 million led by Evolvence India, with Edelweiss Group, Equanimity Ventures and 100Unicorns — valuing the company at roughly $100 million (~₹850 crore) by December 2022 (Inc42, June 2024).
• Extended Series B1, June 2024: ₹100 crore (~$12 million) co-led by Evolvence India and Edelweiss Group, at a valuation of ₹1,200-1,400 crore — about a 60% step-up from the December 2022 mark (Inc42, June 2024).
• Series C, August 2025: $30 million (~₹263 crore) led by growth investor Playbook, with secondary participation from Midas that let some early backers partially exit; the round valued RENÉE at $200 million (~₹1,755 crore), roughly a 40-50% step-up on the Series B1 valuation (Inc42, August 2025; Entrackr, August 2025).

Total capital raised is reported at just over $76 million (~₹730 crore) across these rounds since 2021, per YourStory and Inc42 (August 2025); the aggregator Tracxn shows a lower total of $55.2 million, reflecting several early rounds it lists as amount-undisclosed. What each backer changed: Mensa Brands’ Series A brought a marketplace-scaling and category playbook from its house-of-brands model; Evolvence India, the largest repeat institutional backer across two rounds, funded the shift into offline shop-in-shop retail; Playbook’s Series C brought RENÉE its first dedicated growth-stage investor and a valuation reset closer to $200 million.

How it makes money

• Product strategy leans on multi-functional, innovation-led SKUs — the five-shade “Fab 5” lipstick, three-in-one colour sticks and pH-reactive lipstick shades — sold at mass-premium price points rather than at prestige-counter prices (Inc42, February 2025).
• Distribution is omnichannel: the company’s own website, marketplaces (Nykaa, Amazon, Flipkart), quick commerce, and roughly 25,000 offline touchpoints including shop-in-shop counters, as of FY26 (Inc42, June 2026).
• Cost structure is marketing-heavy: in FY24, total expenditure of ₹264 crore against ₹200 crore of total revenue was led by advertising and promotion spend of ₹102.51 crore — 43% of FY24’s cost base and a 70.6% jump over FY23’s ₹60.1 crore (Entrackr, November 2024).
• Unit economics have been improving: the company spent ₹1.38 for every ₹1 of operating revenue earned in FY24, improving to ₹1.23 in FY25 (Startuppedia, citing regulatory filings, March 2026).
• The part people get wrong: RENÉE’s public identity leans on Aashka Goradia’s celebrity, but its cost base looks like any contract-manufactured D2C beauty brand’s — the margin pressure sits in performance-marketing spend needed to acquire customers, not in a celebrity premium on the product itself.

The numbers

Figures below are operating revenue and net loss, in ₹ crore, as reported in regulatory filings for FY23-FY25 (via Entrackr and Startuppedia) and as company-stated to Inc42 for FY26, which had not been filed with the Registrar of Companies at the time of writing.

Losses widened every year from FY23 through FY25 even as revenue nearly tripled, before narrowing 46% year-on-year in FY26 on Valani’s account to Inc42 (June 2026) — the company has set an internal target of profitability in FY27, alongside a ₹600 crore revenue goal (Inc42, June 2026).

Where the money comes from

• Offline retail (shop-in-shop counters and general trade): 35% of FY26 revenue (Inc42, June 2026).
• Online marketplaces — Nykaa, Flipkart, Amazon: 35% of FY26 revenue (Inc42, June 2026).
• Quick commerce: 15% of FY26 revenue (Inc42, June 2026).
• Direct-to-consumer website: 15% of FY26 revenue (Inc42, June 2026).
• The surprise: despite an Instagram-native, influencer-driven brand image, the company says roughly 60% of its customers come from Tier II-IV towns rather than metro India (Inc42, June 2026).

The risks

• Persistent cash burn despite scale. Net loss grew from ₹32.66 crore in FY23 to ₹64.2 crore in FY25 even as revenue nearly tripled, driven chiefly by advertising and promotion spend that rose 70.6% in FY24 alone to ₹102.51 crore (Entrackr, November 2024) — a mechanism where growth is bought with marketing rupees that do not yet convert to reliable organic repeat purchase.
• Channel concentration and margin pressure. Half of FY26 revenue came from online marketplaces and quick commerce (Inc42, June 2026), channels that typically carry platform commissions and periodic discounting demands the company does not fully control — a structural drag on gross margin that a pure D2C-website model would not carry.
• Crowded, well-funded competition. RENÉE competes directly with SUGAR Cosmetics, Mamaearth, Purplle, MyGlamm and Plum among new-age brands, and with Lakme and Maybelline among legacy players; a 2024 category survey ranked RENÉE third in usage recognition behind Lakme and Maybelline, with SUGAR and MyGlamm close behind on brand awareness (Entrackr, December 2024) — a field crowded enough that customer-acquisition costs are unlikely to fall on their own.

The takeaway

The lesson in RENÉE’s numbers is not that a celebrity founder and a strong Instagram following can build a beauty brand — plenty of those have tried and stalled. It is that pairing a product-and-brand founder with operators who have already scaled and exited one consumer company measurably changed the trajectory: the same three years that took Goradia’s solo venture nowhere took the merged RENÉE from ₹1 crore a month to a ₹1,755 crore valuation. But repeat-founder credibility bought speed, not profitability — five years and five funding rounds after the merger, the company is still spending more than it earns, and its own target for breaking even sits a full year out. Complementary founders can compress the time it takes to find product-market fit; they cannot, on their own, compress the time it takes to find a profitable unit economics model in a marketing-intensive category.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded RENÉE Cosmetics and when?

Actress Aashka Goradia Goble began developing the brand around 2018 and launched a solo line in 2019; it was rebranded as RENÉE in September 2020 after she merged the venture with Beardo co-founders Ashutosh Valani and Priyank Shah. The company was incorporated as Renee Cosmetics Private Limited on 18 October 2019, per its Registrar of Companies filing.

How is RENÉE Cosmetics connected to Beardo?

Valani and Shah co-founded men’s grooming brand Beardo, which FMCG major Marico acquired in stages — a 45% stake in 2017 and the remaining 55% in 2020 — in a deal Entrackr estimated at ₹350-400 crore. The pair used that operating experience and exit proceeds to help scale RENÉE from 2020 onward.

Is RENÉE Cosmetics profitable?

No. The company posted net losses in every fiscal year from FY23 to FY25 (₹32.66 crore, ₹61.45 crore and ₹64.2 crore respectively, per regulatory filings), before narrowing losses to a company-stated ₹36 crore in FY26. Management has targeted profitability in FY27.

How much funding has RENÉE Cosmetics raised, and at what valuation?

Across five priced rounds since 2021 — Series A, Series B, an extended Series B1 and a Series C — RENÉE has raised just over $76 million (~₹730 crore), per YourStory and Inc42 (August 2025). Its August 2025 Series C, led by Playbook, valued the company at $200 million (~₹1,755 crore).

Is RENÉE Cosmetics listed on a stock exchange?

No. RENÉE Cosmetics is a privately held company with no announced IPO plans as of September 2026.

Sources

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

• Entrackr, “Category creator Beardo’s Rs 350 Cr exit story built with Rs 3 Cr investment”, July 2020
• Entrackr, “RENÉE Cosmetics’ revenue soars 2X to Rs 200 Cr in FY24”, November 2024
• Entrackr, “From Legacy to Innovation: How Startups are Redefining the Makeup Industry”, December 2024
• Inc42, “The RENÉE Makeover: How Beardo’s Founders Built An INR 350 Cr Beauty Brand”, February 2025
• Inc42, “RENEE Cosmetics Eyes INR 100 Cr Funding From Existing Investors”, June 2024
• StartupTalky, “RENÉE Cosmetics: Bold, Cruelty-Free & Vegan Beauty Revolution”, November 2024
• Inc42, “RENEE Cosmetics Mops Up $30 Mn At $200 Mn Valuation”, August 2025
• Entrackr, “RENÉE Cosmetics raises $30 Mn in Series C at $200 Mn valuation”, August 2025
• Startuppedia, “Actress Aashka Goradia’s D2C Brand RENEE Cosmetics Reports Rs 328.6 Crore Revenue in FY25; Loss Stands at Rs 64.2 Crore”, March 2026
• Inc42, “RENÉE Cosmetics’ Revenue Crosses ₹400 Cr Mark In FY26, Loss Down 46% YoY”, June 2026
• Tracxn, Renee Cosmetics company profile (funding rounds, entity details), accessed September 2026
• ZaubaCorp / ClearTax, Renee Cosmetics Private Limited corporate filing record (CIN U74999GJ2019PTC110368), accessed September 2026

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