Bombay Shaving Company spent its first two years selling a premium shaving kit that only one in ten customers bothered to buy a second time. In the financial year ending March 2026, the same company — now selling far more than razors — reported ₹634.7 crore (around $66 million) in operating revenue, up 139 percent on the year before, and turned adjusted-EBITDA positive for the first time in its decade-long life.
Between those two facts sits a pandemic, a product the company almost didn’t build, a legal fight with the world’s biggest razor maker that was still playing out in a Delhi courtroom in September 2026, and a founder who briefly became the most argued-about person on Indian LinkedIn for telling twenty-somethings to work 18-hour days. This is the story of how a company built to sell an exclusive experience ended up surviving by becoming something closer to mass-market FMCG.
Quick facts
| Company | Bombay Shaving Company (legal entity: Visage Lines Personal Care Private Limited) |
| Founded | June 2016, Gurugram |
| Founder(s) | Shantanu Deshpande (Founder-CEO), with co-founders Deepu Panicker, Raunak Munot and Rohit Jaiswal |
| Businesses | Bombay Shaving Company (men’s grooming), Bombae (women’s hair removal and personal care), 100Days.co (B2B digital marketing arm) |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹634.7 crore operating revenue in FY26, up 139% year-on-year (company statement, as reported by Inc42, July 2026) |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Net loss narrowed 97.4% to ₹9 crore in FY26; adjusted EBITDA turned positive at ₹2.2 crore versus a ₹38.3 crore adjusted-EBITDA loss in FY25 (Inc42, July 2026) |
| Listed | Private; company has stated it is targeting an IPO within 18–24 months as of November 2025 (Deccan Herald, BW Retail World) |
| Market value / last valuation | Not disclosed. The ₹136 crore round closed in November 2025 did not carry a published valuation (Outlook Business, Indian Retailer) |
| Key shareholders | Founder Shantanu Deshpande, Sixth Sense Ventures (lead investor, 2025 round), Reckitt (RB), Colgate-Palmolive, Malabar Investments, with Rahul Dravid, Patni Family Office and Gulf Islamic Investments (GII) among other backers |
What they do
Bombay Shaving Company sells razors, shaving cream, trimmers, body groomers and skincare to men, and — through its sister brand Bombae, launched in 2020 — hair-removal and personal-care products (razors, wax strips, hair removal devices) to women. The company sells across its own website, Amazon and Flipkart, quick-commerce apps such as Zepto and Blinkit, and roughly 13,000 modern-trade outlets plus general-trade stores in 25 cities and 14 exclusive brand outlets, including three at airports (Indian Retailer, 2023–24 reporting). It positions itself against both legacy players such as Gillette and Philips and homegrown D2C rivals such as Beardo, Ustraa and The Man Company, targeting a younger buyer — the company has said its core customer is aged 16 to 30, versus an older base for incumbent brands.
The origin
Shantanu Deshpande spent roughly five years as a consultant at McKinsey before leaving to start Bombay Shaving Company in June 2016 with co-founders Deepu Panicker, Raunak Munot and Rohit Jaiswal. Around 25 of his former McKinsey bosses and mentors backed the venture in its early days, and the company started with a kitty of about ₹4.6–4.7 crore (YourStory, 2021). The founding insight was narrow and confident: that Indian men would pay a premium for a curated, imported-feeling shaving ritual. The company launched with a six-part shaving kit — a metal razor, pre-shave scrub, shaving cream, post-shave balm, brush and Japanese blades — priced at around ₹3,500, sold only as a bundle, only direct to consumer.
The struggle years
The premium-kit bet did not hold up against how Indian men actually shopped. Only about 10% of buyers came back for a second purchase, and by FY18 (year ending March 2018) revenue was stuck at roughly ₹5 crore — a figure Deshpande himself has called disappointing for a company operating on the belief that its product was “good enough to be exclusive” (Forbes India). The company was, in effect, selling an experience to people who mostly wanted a razor.
The pandemic made the gap harder to ignore. By July 2020, monthly revenue had fallen to around ₹2 crore, as India’s lockdowns hit both grooming habits and a business built around a discretionary, gifting-adjacent product (Forbes India). Losses kept climbing through this period: the company’s loss nearly doubled to ₹80.25 crore in FY23 even as revenue from operations grew to ₹177.30 crore that year (Inc42, citing regulatory filings). The company was growing and burning cash at the same time, without a clear answer to why customers weren’t sticking around.
The turning point
The pivot traces to a specific moment inside the company in 2020. During a team meeting, a colleague, Siddha Jain, held up a Cadbury Dairy Milk bar, and Deshpande has described realising in that instant that “Dairy Milk is generic for chocolates… but what does Bombay Shaving Company stand for? Nothing” (Forbes India). The company had built a brand around a premium ritual that most Indian men didn’t actually want to think about; it needed to become a name people reached for by habit, not by occasion.
That reframing pointed the company toward a market it hadn’t touched: women’s hair removal, which Deshpande sized at roughly ₹20,000 crore in India, more than three times the roughly ₹6,000 crore men’s grooming segment the company had been fighting over (Forbes India). The company launched Bombae in the third quarter of 2020, positioning itself as a hair-removal company “for all” rather than a men’s-only brand. The numbers either side of that call are stark: revenue went from ₹37.7 crore in FY21 to ₹110 crore in FY22, roughly a threefold jump in a single year, with the company projecting a ₹300 crore run rate for FY23 at the time (Forbes India).
The money behind it
Bombay Shaving Company has raised in excess of $65 million (roughly ₹520 crore at current rates) across more than a dozen rounds since 2016, per aggregated deal data (Inc42 company financials page). Three backers stand out for what they changed, not just what they wrote:
Colgate-Palmolive invested ₹18 crore (about $2.6 million) for a 14% stake in August 2018 — an early strategic bet from a global FMCG major that gave the young D2C company mentorship access rather than just capital (Entrepreneur India).
Reckitt (RB) led a £4 million round on 28 January 2021, taking a board seat through its then-SVP for eCommerce, Digital and Ventures, Arjun Purkayastha, and describing the deal as backing “innovative, purpose-driven brands” that fit its push into new categories (Reckitt press release). Reckitt separately partnered with Bombay Shaving Company to run direct-to-consumer operations for its Durex and Enfamil brands in India.
Malabar Investments led a Series C round of roughly ₹160 crore ($21 million) announced in January 2022, with Patni Family Office, Gulf Islamic Investments and Singularity among the other participants (Venture Intelligence, BeautyMatter).
The most recent round — ₹136 crore, closed on 12 November 2025 and led by Sixth Sense Ventures — was a mix of primary capital and secondary sale, with participation from founder Shantanu Deshpande himself, Patni Family Office, GII, other HNIs, and former India cricket captain Rahul Dravid as a named investor (Outlook Business, Indian Retailer). Both outlets that reported the round directly and independently stated its valuation was not disclosed; company statements around the round instead emphasised a ₹550 crore-plus net revenue run rate and PAT profitability reached during FY25, alongside plans to take the company public “sooner rather than later” (Outlook Business).
How it makes money
The business is a fairly conventional D2C-to-omnichannel FMCG model: source and manufacture grooming and personal-care products, sell them at a gross margin across owned digital channels, marketplaces, quick commerce and physical retail, and spend heavily on performance and brand marketing to keep customer acquisition flowing. In FY26, cost of goods sold was ₹404.9 crore against ₹634.7 crore of revenue, and marketing spend was ₹87.6 crore, up 67.8% year-on-year, funding the 139% revenue jump (Inc42, citing regulatory filings). Employee costs, by contrast, rose only 9% to ₹47.3 crore — the growth was bought largely with marketing rupees and channel expansion, not headcount.
The part outsiders tend to get wrong is treating this as a razor company. Bombae, the women’s brand, now contributes about 25% of total revenue and holds roughly a 7% share of its category, according to the company’s own FY26 disclosure (Inc42) — meaning a quarter of Bombay Shaving Company’s business today has nothing to do with men’s shaving at all. Roughly 70% of overall sales come through online channels — split fairly evenly across quick commerce, the company’s own website, and marketplaces such as Amazon and Flipkart — with the remaining 30% from offline retail (Indian Retailer reporting, based on company disclosures).
The numbers
Four years of results show a company that took a long time to convert scale into profit, then compressed most of that improvement into a single year:
| Year (₹ crore) | FY23 | FY24 | FY25 | FY26 |
| Revenue | 177.3 (operations) | 225.9 (operations) / 233.4 (total) | 265.5 (operations) / 271.1 (total) | 634.7 (operating) |
| Net loss | 80.3 | 62.2 | 58.2 | 9.0 |
| Adjusted EBITDA | not disclosed | not disclosed | -38.3 | +2.2 |
(Figures per Inc42’s reporting on Bombay Shaving Company’s regulatory filings, published December 2024 and July 2026.) The loss line moved gradually for three years — down 22% in FY24, then a further 6.5% in FY25 — before falling 97.4% in FY26 on the back of the revenue surge, taking the company to adjusted-EBITDA profitability for the first time.
Where the money comes from
The clearest split in the business is brand, not geography: Bombay Shaving Company (the men’s range) versus Bombae (women’s), with the latter now at roughly a quarter of revenue after starting from zero in 2020. The second most useful split is channel — online versus offline — running close to 70:30, with offline itself split between roughly 13,000 modern-trade points of sale, general-trade presence in 25 cities, 14 exclusive brand outlets (three of them at airports) and Canteen Stores Department listings for the armed forces (Indian Retailer). The surprise for a company that started as an online-only, direct-to-consumer brand is how much of its current growth strategy runs through unglamorous, high-friction offline retail and quick commerce rather than its own website.
The risks
Three risks sit close to the surface, and the company has effectively disclosed each through its own conduct rather than a filing.
A live legal fight with Gillette. In September 2026, the Delhi High Court intervened in a dispute over Bombay Shaving Company’s “Switch4” razor campaign, which questioned consumer habits around Gillette’s blade-replacement system. Justice Jyoti Singh called a mock-courtroom sequence in the ad “an outright mockery” of judicial proceedings and had it removed; Gillette separately objected to the revised advertisement on disparagement grounds, and the court left further challenges open (Inventiva). The episode shows the limits of the comparative-advertising playbook a challenger brand needs to use against an entrenched market leader — Bombay Shaving Company says it still stands by Switch4’s underlying claims, but the legal exposure is real and ongoing.
Crowded competition on both flanks. The company competes against global incumbents (Gillette, Philips) with far deeper marketing budgets and against a cluster of well-funded Indian D2C rivals (Beardo, Ustraa, The Man Company) chasing the same younger, digitally-acquired customer. Category leadership claims — such as the company’s description of itself as India’s number two shaving brand — are self-reported rather than independently audited market-share data.
Growth still leans on marketing spend. FY26’s 139% revenue jump came alongside a 67.8% jump in marketing expenditure and a 159% jump in cost of goods sold (Inc42) — the adjusted-EBITDA turnaround happened at scale, but it has not yet been tested at a lower rate of ad spend growth, which will matter to how public-market investors read the business ahead of a planned IPO.
The takeaway
The lesson in Bombay Shaving Company’s numbers is not “pivot when things get hard” — most struggling founders already know that. It’s that the original founding insight (Indian men will pay for an imported-feeling premium ritual) was tested honestly, against a real repeat-purchase number, and found wanting, well before the company had the luxury of pretending otherwise. A 10% repeat-purchase rate is a data point, not a vibe, and Deshpande’s team let it override their own founding thesis rather than explaining it away. The company that resulted looks almost nothing like the one that launched in 2016 — it sells to women as much as men, moves most of its volume through marketplaces and quick commerce rather than its own site, and only became profitable on an adjusted basis a decade in. That is a longer and less flattering timeline than most startup narratives admit to, and it is the more useful one to learn from.
Frequently asked questions
Who founded Bombay Shaving Company and when?
Shantanu Deshpande founded Bombay Shaving Company in June 2016 in Gurugram, along with co-founders Deepu Panicker, Raunak Munot and Rohit Jaiswal, after Deshpande left a consulting career at McKinsey.
Is Bombay Shaving Company profitable?
The company turned adjusted-EBITDA positive in FY26, reporting ₹2.2 crore of adjusted EBITDA against a ₹38.3 crore adjusted-EBITDA loss in FY25, while its net loss narrowed to ₹9 crore from ₹58.2 crore, per its own disclosures reported by Inc42 in July 2026. It is not yet profitable on a full net-income basis.
Who are Bombay Shaving Company’s main investors?
Backers include Sixth Sense Ventures (lead investor in the November 2025 round), Reckitt (RB), Colgate-Palmolive, Malabar Investments, and individual investors including Rahul Dravid, alongside Patni Family Office and Gulf Islamic Investments.
What is Bombae and how does it relate to Bombay Shaving Company?
Bombae is the company’s women’s hair-removal and personal-care brand, launched in 2020 after the parent company (Visage Lines Personal Care) identified the roughly ₹20,000 crore women’s hair-removal market as larger than the men’s grooming segment it started in. Bombae now accounts for about 25% of total company revenue as of FY26.
Is Bombay Shaving Company planning to go public?
The company has stated it is targeting an IPO within 18 to 24 months of its November 2025 funding round, aiming for around ₹150 crore in EBITDA ahead of the listing, according to company statements reported by BW Retail World and Deccan Herald.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Inc42, “Bombay Shaving Company Claims Adjusted EBITDA Profitability In FY26, Loss Narrows 97%”, July 2026
- Inc42, “Bombay Shaving Company’s FY24 Loss Declines To INR 62 Cr”, December 2024
- Inc42 company financials page for Bombay Shaving Company (Visage Lines Personal Care Private Limited), accessed September 2026
- Forbes India, “How Bombay Shaving Company found its core in the middle of the pandemic”
- YourStory, “From McKinsey to Bombay Shaving Company”, July 2021
- Entrepreneur India, “Colgate-Palmolive acquires 14% stake in Bombay Shaving Company”
- Reckitt.com press release, “RB invests in Bombay Shaving Company”, January 2021
- Venture Intelligence / BeautyMatter, reporting on the Malabar Investments-led Series C round, January 2022
- Outlook Business, “Bombay Shaving Company Raises ₹136 Cr as D2C Brand Gears Up for IPO”, November 2025
- Indian Retailer, “{Funding Alert} Bombay Shaving Company Raises Rs 136 Cr, Eyes IPO Amid Strong Growth”, November 2025
- Deccan Herald, “Bombay Shaving Company Raises ₹136 Crore, Plans for IPO After Doubling Revenue”, November 2025
- BW Retail World, “Bombay Shaving Company Eyes IPO In 18–24 Months”
- Indian Retailer, “Bombay Shaving Company Rides Omnichannel, Quick Commerce Boom”
- Inventiva, “Bombay Shaving Company Changed Its Ad After A Court Order. The BSC Vs Gillette Fight…”, September 2026
- Business Today, “‘No rona dhona’ startup founder apologises for LinkedIn post encouraging 18 hour workdays”, September 2022
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