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Startup Deep Dive : Atomberg — from 30 days of cash to India’s top premium fan brand

The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for Atomberg.

Thirty days. That is how much cash Atomberg Technologies had left in the bank in mid-2019, seven years after two IIT Bombay engineers set out to fix a fan that had not changed in fifty years. Today the same company has filed papers with SEBI for a ₹450 crore initial public offering, and its BLDC ceiling fans hold the largest share of India’s premium fan market.

The company still loses money — ₹148.9 crore in the year ended March 2026, on revenue of ₹1,293.8 crore ($134.8 million, at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) — even as it claims a 46.1% share of premium fans by cumulative sales value, per its DRHP. That contradiction, growing fast and burning cash while dominating a category, sits at the heart of the Atomberg story, and it is the same tension every investor reading its draft prospectus will have to price in.

Quick facts

Company Atomberg Technologies Limited
Founded 28 February 2012, incubated at SINE, IIT Bombay
Founder(s) Manoj Meena (founder, 2012); Sibabrata Das (co-founder, joined 2013)
Businesses BLDC ceiling and pedestal fans, mixer grinders, water purifiers, cold-pressed juicers, smart locks; motors and controllers sold to other manufacturers through subsidiary Atomberg Innovations
Latest FY revenue ₹1,293.8 crore, revenue from operations, FY26 (year ended March 2026)
Latest FY profit/loss Net loss of ₹148.88 crore, FY26
Listed Not listed; draft red herring prospectus filed with SEBI on 20 August 2026 for a mainboard IPO
Market value / last valuation Reported at about $500 million post-money after a December 2025 funding round, up from a reported $357 million in May 2023
Key shareholders A91 Partners (21.02%), Manoj Meena (17.73%), Temasek’s V-Sciences Investments (11.8%), Jungle Ventures (10.03%), Sibabrata Das (10.02%), as per its DRHP

What they do

Atomberg makes and sells energy-efficient home appliances, built around a single insight: the brushless direct current (BLDC) motor. Its flagship product, the Gorilla ceiling fan, draws about 28 watts against the 75-80 watts a standard induction-motor fan uses, a claimed 65% cut in running cost, sold to Indian households through its own website, Amazon, Flipkart, and a growing offline retail network. Around that fan business it has built out mixer grinders, water purifiers, cold-pressed juicers and smart locks, and it also now sells the BLDC motors and controllers themselves to other appliance makers, including Voltas, Godrej and Blue Star, through a separate subsidiary, Atomberg Innovations.

The origin

Manoj Meena, an electrical engineering graduate of IIT Bombay with a background in control systems and robotics, and his hostel-mate Sibabrata Das kept returning to a mundane question: why did a ceiling fan that ran 14-18 hours a day in most Indian homes still consume the same amount of power it had for decades. Incorporated on 28 February 2012 at IIT Bombay’s Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the venture spent its first three years doing technical consulting for the Defence Research and Development Organisation, the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, the Indian Space Research Organisation, and IIT Bombay itself, before the founders built their first BLDC ceiling fan prototype in Navi Mumbai in April 2015. The core idea was AtomSENSE, a sensorless motor-control algorithm that let a BLDC motor, until then mostly used in industrial and automotive applications, run cheaply enough for a mass-market ceiling fan.

The struggle years

Before the fan, there was no shortage of failure. Between 2012 and 2015, the founders and a small team tried at least five other ideas to keep the lights on, including a vehicle-tracking system, a data-acquisition device, website development work, silk trading, and an online cosmetics marketplace; none of them scaled. By 2015, mentors at their own incubator were advising the pair to take up salaried jobs and quit, and friends were making the same suggestion more gently. The pivot to fans did not immediately fix the underlying problem of cash. Production scaled slowly and unevenly, from about 30 fans a day in April 2016 to 500 a day by April 2018 to roughly 1,000 a day by early 2019, with the company selling directly to consumers online rather than through the wholesale trade that dominated the category. Revenue for the year ended March 2019 was about ₹37 crore, respectable for a seven-year-old hardware startup, but nowhere close to funding a fight with Crompton, Havells, Bajaj Electricals and Usha.

The turning point

By mid-2019, after hundreds of rejected pitches to venture capital firms in India and abroad who doubted a small team could take on entrenched appliance conglomerates, Atomberg was down to about a month and a half of operating runway, with salaries running late and vendors unpaid. On 4 September 2019, that changed: the company closed a $10 million (about ₹75 crore) Series A round led by A91 Partners, with Whiteboard Capital and Survam Partners, the family office linked to the Munjal (Hero Group) family, also participating. A91’s founders, veterans of Sequoia Capital India, backed the founders’ bet that a better-engineered, higher-priced fan could out-compete on running cost rather than shelf price. The round did not make Atomberg profitable, but it kept the company alive past the point every prior VC conversation had said it would not survive, and gave it the capital to keep scaling production and marketing at a moment competitors had barely noticed the BLDC threat.

The money behind it

Atomberg has raised more than $150 million across roughly nine rounds since that 2019 rescue. A91 Partners, the Series A lead, stayed on through Series B in December 2020 and is now the company’s largest institutional shareholder at 21.02% ahead of the IPO. Temasek, the Singapore state investor, entered in May 2023 as co-lead (with Steadview Capital) of an $86 million Series C that reportedly valued the company at $357 million, then came back on 1 December 2025 to lead a ₹212 crore ($24 million) Series C extension, of which its investment vehicle V-Sciences Investments put in about ₹132 crore; that round reportedly pushed Atomberg’s post-money valuation to around $500 million. Jungle Ventures and Inflexor Ventures joined at Series C and topped up in the 2025 extension, and both, along with A91, Steadview and Survam Partners, are booked to sell part of their stakes in the IPO’s offer-for-sale component. The founders themselves put in a combined ₹44 crore in the December 2025 round, a signal to incoming investors ahead of listing.

How it makes money

Atomberg’s economics still run through hardware, not services: it designs and gets appliances contract-manufactured, brands them, and sells them at a premium to category averages, betting that a customer who saves on electricity bills will pay more upfront. Cost of materials is by far its largest expense, ₹738 crore in FY26 against total expenditure of ₹1,460 crore, meaning components (magnets, electronics, motors) and assembly eat the bulk of every rupee of revenue before anything else is spent. Advertising and sales promotion, ₹135 crore in FY26, is the next-biggest outlay, reflecting a brand that has leaned on cricket sponsorship (it signed on as an official BCCI partner in 2022) and digital campaigns to justify its price premium against incumbents with decades of retail trust. The part outsiders tend to get wrong is that Atomberg is not primarily an e-commerce brand any more: online sales were ₹456.45 crore of FY26 revenue, meaning offline retail, now spanning 46,932 touchpoints across roughly 1,600 cities through about 626 distributors, has become the larger channel as the company has scaled. Margin, such as it is, sits in the gap between what a premium BLDC fan costs to build and what a customer will pay for a lower electricity bill; adjusted EBITDA was positive but thin, at ₹37.12 crore in FY26, before R&D, brand-building and one-off costs pull the bottom line into loss.

The numbers

Figures below are revenue from operations and net loss, in ₹ crore, as reported in Atomberg’s fintrackr filings and its draft prospectus.

Fiscal year Revenue (₹ crore) Net loss (₹ crore)
FY23 (year ended March 2023) 645 138
FY24 (year ended March 2024) 797 (restated) 199 (restated)
FY25 (year ended March 2025) 959.5 117
FY26 (year ended March 2026) 1,293.8 148.9

Two things stand out. First, FY24’s figures were restated a year later, from an originally reported ₹848 crore revenue and ₹202 crore loss to ₹797 crore and ₹199 crore in the FY25 comparative filing, a reminder that year-one press numbers on Indian startups often move once the next year’s audited accounts are filed. Second, the loss line is not a straight line down: after narrowing sharply in FY25 on a 36% cut to employee costs, it widened again in FY26 as material costs grew faster than revenue and R&D spend rose to ₹86.79 crore, even as the top line grew 34.8%.

Where the money comes from

Home appliances, meaning fans and the smaller connected-appliance line, still dominate: ₹1,153 crore, or 89.1% of FY26 revenue, growing 23.1% year on year. Kitchen appliances, the newer mixer-grinder and juicer push, were ₹124 crore, just 9.6% of revenue but growing more than sixfold, and the B2B motors-and-controllers business through Atomberg Innovations was a small ₹17.2 crore, 1.3% of revenue, but also growing more than fourfold. The geographic surprise sits inside the offline consumer-appliances business: tier-2 and smaller towns accounted for 49.6% of that revenue in FY26, ahead of both metros (30.9%) and tier-1 cities (19.5%). A brand that built its reputation as an online, urban D2C challenger now earns roughly half its offline revenue from smaller-town India, where the pitch of a fan that pays for itself in electricity savings appears to land harder than in metros with more brand choice and less price sensitivity.

The risks

Three risks are visible even before Atomberg’s DRHP is finalised for its Red Herring Prospectus. One, category concentration: 89.1% of FY26 revenue still comes from home appliances, chiefly fans, so any slowdown in that single category, whether from a demand shock, a cheaper competing technology, or a price war, hits the business disproportionately. Two, competitive response: Crompton, Havells, Orient Electric, Bajaj Electricals and Usha, the five incumbents that together still account for roughly three-quarters of the overall ceiling fan market by most industry estimates, have all launched or expanded their own BLDC ranges, competing on the distribution networks and brand trust built over decades, an advantage Atomberg cannot buy quickly. Three, the persistent loss: Atomberg has not posted a profitable year on record, and FY26’s loss actually widened from FY25 even as adjusted EBITDA turned only modestly positive, meaning the company is scaling a category leadership position without yet proving it can convert that share into sustainable profit, a question public-market investors will price directly into the IPO.

The takeaway

Atomberg’s most transferable lesson is not about fans or even about BLDC motors: it is that a genuine engineering advantage can buy a startup enough time to survive repeated near-death funding gaps, but it does not buy immunity from the economics of the category it is trying to remake. The company needed fourteen years, five failed side businesses, and one month-and-a-half-from-zero moment before its physics-backed pitch found investors willing to write the check; and even with a category-leading market share and a listing on the horizon, it is still spending more than it earns to hold that position. Betting on a better product is necessary in hardware; it is rarely sufficient on its own to become profitable quickly.

Frequently asked questions

What does Atomberg make?

Atomberg makes BLDC (brushless direct current) motor-based ceiling and pedestal fans, along with mixer grinders, water purifiers, cold-pressed juicers and smart locks, and separately sells BLDC motors and controllers to other appliance manufacturers.

Who founded Atomberg and when?

Manoj Meena founded Atomberg in February 2012 at IIT Bombay’s SINE incubator; Sibabrata Das joined as co-founder in 2013. Both are IIT Bombay engineering graduates.

Is Atomberg profitable?

No. Atomberg reported a net loss of ₹148.88 crore in FY26 (year ended March 2026) on revenue from operations of ₹1,293.77 crore, and it has not reported an annual profit in its available financial history.

How much funding has Atomberg raised and what is it worth?

Atomberg has raised more than $150 million to date from investors including A91 Partners, Temasek, Steadview Capital, Jungle Ventures and Inflexor Ventures. It was reportedly valued at $357 million after its May 2023 Series C round, and around $500 million after a December 2025 extension round, per press reports; these figures are not company-confirmed.

Is Atomberg going public?

Atomberg Technologies Limited filed a draft red herring prospectus with SEBI on 20 August 2026 for a mainboard IPO comprising a ₹450 crore fresh issue and an offer for sale of about 7.65 crore shares by existing investors and founders.

Sources

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

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