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Startup Deep Dive : Beco — revenue jumped to Rs 108 crore while losses widened and a court restrained its ads against HUL

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The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for Beco.

In September 2026, the Delhi High Court ordered a small Mumbai cleaning-products brand to stop telling shoppers that Hindustan Unilever’s Surf Excel and Vim could irritate their skin. The brand doing the telling, Beco, had spent the previous two years building exactly that kind of anti-establishment message into a business that grew revenue from ₹24.97 crore to ₹108.08 crore.

Beco sells bamboo tissues, bio-enzyme cleaners and compostable garbage bags as a direct answer to the chemical-and-plastic aisle that Hindustan Unilever and its peers have owned for decades. The company has never been profitable, its losses widened even as revenue nearly doubled in its most recent reported year, and its most effective marketing idea just got restrained in court. Here is what the filings, funding announcements and that court order actually show.

Quick facts

Company Beco, a brand of Kwick Living (I) Private Limited
Founded 2019, Mumbai (Forbes India, Entrackr)
Founders Aditya Ruia, Anuj Ruia and Akshay Varma
Businesses Bamboo, bio-enzyme and compostable home, kitchen and personal-care products sold D2C, on marketplaces, quick commerce and general trade
FY25 revenue ₹108.08 crore ($11.26 million), up 119% year-on-year (Inc42, citing company/MCA data)
FY24 net loss ₹9.36 crore, widened from ₹3.9 crore in FY23 (MCA filings, via TheKredible); FY25 profit/loss not yet public
Listed Private; no IPO announced
Last reported valuation Approximately ₹236 crore ($28.1 million as reported), as of August 2024 — TheKredible’s regulatory-filing estimate, not confirmed by the company
Key shareholders Founders, with institutional backing from Rukam Capital, Tanglin Venture Partners, Titan Capital Winners Fund, Climate Angels Fund and Synergy Capital

What they do

Beco makes and sells plastic-free household and personal-care products: bamboo-fibre kitchen towels, facial tissues and toilet rolls, cornstarch-based compostable garbage bags, bio-enzyme dishwash and floor cleaners, laundry liquids, and bamboo toothbrushes. The pitch to the buyer is direct substitution — the same category Hindustan Unilever, Procter & Gamble and ITC already sell into, but without the plastic packaging or, as Beco markets it, the chemical additives. The company says its range has grown from around 20 SKUs in 2022 to more than 160 SKUs by 2025 (Forbes India, 2022; Inc42, 2025), and it sells to more than 15 lakh customers across India (Inc42, 2025), up from the roughly 1 million households it reported reaching in 2022 (Business Standard, 2022).

The origin

Aditya Ruia and Anuj Ruia are cousins; Akshay Varma is a close friend they made through Mumbai’s weekend social circuit. Varma studied at IIT Madras, Aditya Ruia at BITS Pilani, and Anuj Ruia had worked at Procter & Gamble before the three of them started Beco (Forbes India, 2022). Both Varma and Aditya Ruia had already tried and failed at separate ventures — Varma’s Pet It Up, a social network for pet owners, shut down after about a year when his co-founder left; Aditya Ruia’s Quorg, a workplace-messaging platform, was sold within two years while he was still in college (Forbes India, 2022).

The founding moment, as the three have told it to the press, came during a Mumbai beach clean-up in 2019, where they found a chocolate wrapper from a brand that had stopped making that product in the 1990s — still intact three decades later (Forbes India, 2022; Inc42, 2025). That single object became the argument for the company: if plastic packaging outlives the products it wraps by thirty years, the packaging itself is the thing to fix. Beco launched in April 2019 with bamboo tissues, toothbrushes and household cleaners as its first products (Forbes India, 2022).

The struggle years

Beco bootstrapped for its first two years, from launch in April 2019 until it raised its first outside capital in mid-2021 (Forbes India, 2022; Business Standard, 2021). Selling a category where Hindustan Unilever and P&G had decades of shelf space, brand recall and price advantage meant convincing shoppers that a costlier bamboo tissue roll was worth switching for — a slower, harder sell than founders in less commoditised categories face. The company’s own later disclosures show the strain never fully went away even after the funding arrived: net loss widened from ₹3.9 crore in FY23 to ₹9.36 crore in FY24 even as revenue nearly doubled, and EBITDA margin worsened from -15.17% to -18.40% over the same period, as advertising spend jumped from 13.05% to 30.19% of total expenses (MCA filings, via TheKredible, February 2025).

That pattern — revenue climbing while losses widen — is the clearest documented evidence that Beco has had to buy growth rather than earn it organically, a structural version of the same struggle the founders faced in year one: getting a price-sensitive Indian household to pick the sustainable, costlier option over habit.

The turning point

The event that changed Beco’s trajectory was not a funding round but the Covid-19 lockdown. Before March 2020, the company’s monthly revenue stood at around ₹15 lakh. Within two months of the lockdown, it had risen to roughly ₹25 lakh a month, as consumers stuck at home began paying closer attention to hygiene and cleaning products and were, for the first time, willing to try an unfamiliar bamboo-and-bio-enzyme brand delivered to their door (Forbes India, 2022). That roughly 67% jump inside sixty days gave the founders the case they needed to raise their first cheque: Climate Angels Fund and other early backers put in ₹4 crore in 2021 (Business Standard, 2021), the seed capital that let Beco move from a bootstrapped side project to a funded, scaling D2C brand.

The money behind it

Beco has raised capital in three disclosed rounds since 2021, taking cumulative funding to roughly ₹111.67 crore by TheKredible’s tracker, or about $13 million on Entrackr’s dollar-denominated tally as of the August 2024 round — the difference reflects rupee-dollar movement between rounds rather than a factual conflict.

What each backer changed: Climate Angels’ seed cheque converted a bootstrapped hygiene brand into a funded one right after the Covid demand spike proved the model; Rukam Capital’s Series A, with Dia Mirza’s participation, gave Beco a consumer-facing profile and the capital to widen its SKU count from about 20 to well over 100; and Tanglin Venture Partners’ pre-Series B, the largest round to date, was explicitly earmarked for manufacturing capacity and a general-trade retail push that took the brand into roughly 10,000 stores across 20 cities within a year (Entrackr, August 2024). TheKredible’s regulatory-filing model put Beco’s valuation at approximately ₹236 crore ($28.1 million as reported) as of that August 2024 round — a figure the company itself has not confirmed, so it should be read as an estimate rather than a disclosed post-money number.

How it makes money

Beco is a direct-to-consumer manufacturer and seller, not a marketplace or platform, so it earns the full retail margin on what it sells rather than a commission or take rate. Money comes in from product sales across four channels — its own website, third-party e-commerce marketplaces, quick-commerce apps, and general-trade retail stores — and costs go out mainly on raw materials (bamboo pulp, cornstarch, bio-enzyme formulations), manufacturing, logistics for a bulky low-value-density product category, and, increasingly, advertising.

The numbers

Beco’s revenue has grown every year for which figures are public, from ₹4.17 crore in FY21 to ₹108.08 crore ($11.26 million; $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026, Trading Economics) in FY25 — a roughly 26x increase over four years. Profitability has moved the other way: the company reported a small net profit of ₹5 lakh in FY21, then losses every year since as it has spent to acquire customers and expand distribution.

Fiscal year Revenue (₹ crore) Net profit/(loss) (₹ crore)
FY21 4.17 0.05 (profit)
FY23 24.97 (3.90)
FY24 49.79 (9.36)
FY25 108.08 Not yet public

Where the money comes from

Beco does not publish an exact channel-wise revenue split, but the company’s own funding announcements and press coverage describe a shift from a purely online D2C brand toward an omnichannel one, with offline retail becoming a deliberate growth lever rather than an afterthought.

The risks

The takeaway

Beco’s growth curve looks like a textbook D2C success story — revenue up roughly 26 times in four years, a widening retail footprint, backers that include Titan Capital and an Asian Paints promoter. But the numbers sitting next to that growth curve tell a more disciplined story: losses have widened in step with revenue, not shrunk, and the marketing tactic that helped the brand stand out — naming competitors and their ingredients directly — just drew a restraining order from a court, on behalf of a rival with far deeper pockets and far more lawyers. The lesson is not that comparative marketing is wrong; it is that a challenger brand’s sharpest weapon against an incumbent is also the one most likely to be met with a legal response the challenger cannot outspend. Growth funded by advertising and built on confrontation is real growth, but it is also growth that has to keep proving it can survive both a court and a profit-and-loss statement at the same time.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded Beco and when?

Beco was founded in Mumbai in 2019 by cousins Aditya Ruia and Anuj Ruia along with their friend Akshay Varma, who studied at IIT Madras and BITS Pilani, following a beach clean-up that convinced them to build a plastic-free alternative to everyday household products (Forbes India, 2022).

How much funding has Beco raised, and from whom?

Beco has raised roughly ₹111.67 crore (about $13 million, per Entrackr) across a 2021 seed round led by Climate Angels Fund, a December 2022 Series A of $3 million led by Rukam Capital, and an August 2024 pre-Series B of $10 million led by Tanglin Venture Partners, with Titan Capital Winners Fund, Synergy Capital and Asian Paints promoter Manish Choksi also participating (Entrackr, 2022 and 2024; YourStory, 2022 and 2024).

Is Beco profitable?

No. Beco reported a net loss of ₹9.36 crore in FY24, wider than its ₹3.9 crore loss in FY23, even though revenue nearly doubled over the same period; its FY25 profit or loss has not yet been made public (MCA filings via TheKredible, February 2025).

What is the Delhi High Court case against Beco about?

Hindustan Unilever sued Kwick Living, Beco’s parent, over a campaign called “War on What’s Hidden” that claimed HUL’s Surf Excel and Vim could cause skin irritation. On 10 September 2026, the Delhi High Court found the campaign prima facie false or misleading and ordered it withdrawn (Bar and Bench, September 2026; Business Standard, September 2026).

Did Beco appear on Shark Tank India?

No verifiable record connects Beco (Kwick Living) to a Shark Tank India pitch. The bamboo-products company that did appear on the show, raising funding on-air, is a separate business called Bamboo India — a distinct brand from Beco.

Sources

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

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