Chaayos closed the year ended March 2025 with revenue of Rs 310.6 crore (~$32.4 million), up 25% from the year before. It also lost Rs 25.4 crore that same year. Thirteen years after two IIT graduates decided that India’s most-consumed beverage deserved a café chain of its own, the company selling “your kind of tea” still has not worked out how to keep it.
The gap between those two numbers is the story. Chaayos built its brand on a tea-brewing machine that uses facial recognition to remember a regular’s order, survived a self-inflicted overexpansion crisis that nearly wrecked its customer experience, watched its café revenue fall to a tenth of normal in a single month during the pandemic, and only turned EBITDA-positive in the last two years. It is now one of the two brands, alongside Chai Point, that investors point to when they talk about organised chai in India. Whether that adds up to a durable business is a separate question.
Quick facts
| Company | Chaayos, operated by Sunshine Teahouse Private Limited |
| Founded | 2012, first café in Gurugram |
| Founder(s) | Nitin Saluja and Raghav Verma |
| Businesses | Tea cafés built around customisable “Meri Wali Chai”, the Chai Monk brewing machine, delivery and packaged tea/snacks sold via retail and e-commerce |
| Latest FY revenue | Rs 310.6 crore, revenue from operations, FY25 (year ended March 2025) |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Net loss of Rs 25.4 crore, FY25; EBITDA positive at Rs 37 crore |
| Listed | Private; no IPO filing found as of September 2026 |
| Market value / last valuation | $250 million reported at its June 2022 Series C; a later cap-table snapshot cited by Tracxn put it at $309 million as of October 2024 |
| Key shareholders / CEO | Nitin Saluja (co-founder and CEO); investors include Alpha Wave Ventures, Elevation Capital, Tiger Global, Think Investments and SAIF Partners |
What they do
Chaayos sells tea, brewed to order and customised to a guest’s own recipe of milk, sugar, spice and strength, under the tagline “Meri Wali Chai” (“my kind of tea”). The core of the business is a chain of company-run and franchised cafés, concentrated in Delhi-NCR, Mumbai and Bengaluru, where customers order at a counter or through the Chaayos app and can watch their cup being made by Chai Monk, an in-house brewing machine the company introduced in 2016. Around that café core sits a widening retail layer: packaged tea, tea premixes and ready-to-drink bottles sold through modern trade, Amazon, Flipkart and the company’s own website, plus delivery through Swiggy, Zomato and Chaayos’s own channels. The customer is broadly the same urban, mostly white-collar tea drinker that coffee chains such as Starbucks and Cafe Coffee Day had already trained to pay a premium for a beverage outside the home; Chaayos’s bet was that this drinker had no equivalent for chai.
The origin
Nitin Saluja, an IIT Bombay graduate, and Raghav Verma, an IIT Delhi graduate, met while working at the same US consulting firm, Opera Solutions. Saluja, who had also co-founded a robotics-education venture called Think Labs before that, has said in interviews that the idea grew out of a simple homesickness: living in the United States, he could not find a cup of tea that tasted like the “ghar wali chai” he was used to. The founders’ pitch to each other rested on a lopsided statistic they kept citing at the time — India was said to drink roughly 30 cups of tea for every cup of coffee — yet no organised, branded chain existed for tea the way Starbucks and Cafe Coffee Day existed for coffee. Both men quit their consulting jobs and opened the first Chaayos café in Gurugram in 2012, built around the idea that if a customer’s chai could be made exactly the way they wanted it, chai could be sold as an experience rather than a commodity brewed in a kettle at the back of a shop.
The struggle years
The early years were thin, not dramatic. By 2015, Chaayos had grown to seven outlets, about 50 staff and roughly Rs 3.5 crore in revenue, and Saluja has described the period bluntly as one of simply not having enough capital to move faster, as reported by Forbes India.
The company’s first real crisis was self-inflicted. Once fresh funding arrived, Chaayos doubled its outlet count to 19 in 2016 and pushed revenue up to about Rs 10.6 crore, prioritising growth over consistency. The result showed up fast: its Net Promoter Score, a standard measure of customer loyalty, collapsed to 17, a level Saluja later called a warning sign that the company was “growing with our eyes closed.” Chaayos’s response was to stop opening new stores altogether for six months, holding expansion until the score recovered to 40 before it resumed growing, per Forbes India’s account of the episode.
The second crisis arrived from outside. In February 2020, Chaayos had just closed a $21.5 million Series B round of equity and debt meant to take its store count toward 300, according to Business Today’s report at the time. Weeks later, the covid-19 lockdown shut every café overnight; by April 2020, revenue had fallen to roughly 10% of pre-pandemic levels, putting the business’s survival itself in question.
The turning point
What happened next is the hinge of the Chaayos story. With cafés shut and dine-in revenue near zero, the company pivoted hard into direct-to-consumer retail: DIY chai kits, instant tea premixes, and a retail and e-commerce push built from scratch in a matter of weeks, alongside a scramble to strike distribution deals with retail chains. It also leaned into delivery, a channel that had been marginal to the café business until then. The numbers on each side of that pivot are stark: revenue near 10% of normal in April 2020, recovering to about 65% of pre-covid levels by December 2020, with roughly 80% of stores reopened and delivery’s share of revenue climbing from around 1.5% in February 2020 to about 35% by year-end. That packaged-tea and delivery business, built purely to survive a shutdown, is the same retail and online layer that now sits alongside Chaayos’s café revenue and helped the company reach EBITDA profitability in the years that followed.
The money behind it
Chaayos has raised more than $90 million in total across roughly a dozen priced and debt rounds, according to Entrackr’s reporting on its financials, with third-party trackers such as Tracxn and Crunchbase putting the cumulative figure closer to $94 million once smaller and debt rounds are counted. The shape of that capital changed the company at each stage. SAIF Partners (now part of Elevation Capital) and Integrated Capital backed the Series A of $12 million in September 2018, capital that arrived after the 2016 overexpansion crisis and funded a more disciplined phase of growth. Think Investments led the $21.5 million Series B of February 2020, explicitly earmarked to push the store count toward 300 before the pandemic intervened. Alteria Capital added venture debt in April 2021, cushioning the recovery without further equity dilution. The largest round, a $45 million Series C in June 2022, was led by Alpha Wave Ventures with Elevation Capital, Tiger Global Management and Think Investments participating, and it valued the company at $250 million, according to Inc42’s report, which cited a per-share price of Rs 2,514 for the round. A later cap-table snapshot cited by Tracxn placed Chaayos’s valuation at $309 million as of October 2024; this figure has not been tied to a new, publicly announced primary funding round, so it is best read as a reported mark-up on existing shares rather than a confirmed fresh valuation.
How it makes money
The overwhelming majority of Chaayos’s revenue, about 96% in FY25, came from selling manufactured goods: brewed tea, other beverages and snacks, according to Entrackr’s read of the company’s FY25 filings. The rest was a small slice of traded goods and non-operating income. On the cost side, the single largest and fastest-growing line is the cost of materials — tea leaves, milk, spices and packaging — which rose 26% year-on-year in FY25 to Rs 96.32 crore, faster than the 25% revenue growth that year. Employee costs, at Rs 78.65 crore, actually fell 3% as the company held headcount roughly flat while café count grew. The part of the model people tend to miss is depreciation and commissions: Rs 51.8 crore of depreciation and amortisation in FY25, largely from the capital sunk into café fit-outs and Chai Monk machines, and Rs 31.3 crore in commissions — up 21% — paid out to delivery platforms and franchise partners. Those two lines alone are larger than the company’s entire EBITDA of Rs 37 crore, which is why an operationally profitable, EBITDA-positive tea business can still book a net loss once the machines, franchise payouts and finance costs (Rs 29.42 crore) are accounted for.
The numbers
Chaayos’s revenue has grown every year on record, but its losses have narrowed only recently, and largely off a low EBITDA base. Figures below are for the years ended March, drawn from Entrackr’s reporting on the company’s regulatory filings.
| Metric (Rs crore) | FY23 | FY24 | FY25 |
| Revenue from operations | 237.0 | 248.6 | 310.6 |
| Net loss | ~108 (implied by the reported 50.6% year-on-year fall to FY24) | 54.0 | 25.4 |
| EBITDA | Not disclosed in available reporting | 28.35 | 37.0 |
Total expenses tell a parallel story: they fell from about Rs 365.7 crore in FY23 to Rs 325.2 crore in FY24 as the company cut costs to reach EBITDA breakeven, then rose again to Rs 355 crore in FY25 as the business scaled. Chaayos’s own unit-economics disclosure, cited by Entrackr, put the cost of earning one rupee of revenue at Rs 1.31 in FY24 and Rs 1.14 in FY25 — improving, but still above the rupee of revenue it is meant to cover. Return on capital employed was negative in both years, at -6.02% in FY24 and -3.72% in FY25.
Where the money comes from
Geographically, Chaayos’s café network is concentrated in three metros — Delhi-NCR, Mumbai and Bengaluru — with Delhi-NCR its oldest and largest market; a location count by data firm ScrapeHero put Delhi alone at around a quarter of all listed outlets as of mid-2026, though that snapshot of roughly 109 tracked locations sits well below the “200-plus outlets” figure the company and trade press cite, a gap likely explained by how each counts franchise versus scraped, currently listed locations — both figures are given here because they do not agree. By channel, the picture inside the FY25 numbers is less exciting than the technology story Chaayos tells: 96% of revenue is simply manufactured tea, beverages and snacks sold at the counter, through delivery apps, or as packaged product on shelves and online, with only a sliver coming from anything else. The surprise, in other words, is how little of Chaayos’s revenue is explained by the facial-recognition machines and app-based customisation that dominate its press coverage — the business is still, overwhelmingly, brewed tea sold one cup or one packet at a time, at a chain that industry researcher The India Watch says, together with Chai Point, accounted for more than half of organised tea-café revenue in India, even as newer, franchise-heavy chains like Chai Sutta Bar have overtaken both on raw outlet count.
The risks
Three risks sit underneath Chaayos’s recent EBITDA turnaround. The first is input-cost inflation: the cost of materials grew faster than revenue in FY25, and a chai business is structurally exposed to swings in milk and tea-leaf prices in a way that a packaged-goods company with more pricing power is not. The second is regulatory and reputational: Chaayos’s 2019 rollout of facial-recognition technology at its Bengaluru cafés, meant to speed up repeat orders through its “loyaltea” programme, drew a public backlash after customers said they had not consented to being scanned, and the episode became a reference point in India’s data-protection debate; with India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act now in force, any future use of biometric or loyalty data by a consumer-facing chain carries a materially higher compliance bar than it did in 2019. The third is that profitability remains thin and reversible: even after EBITDA rose 6.5 times in FY25, Chaayos still spent Rs 1.14 to earn every rupee of revenue and posted a negative return on capital employed, meaning the recent improvement depends on continued cost discipline and scale rather than being a durable, locked-in margin.
The takeaway
Chaayos’s most useful lesson is not about tea, or even about technology — it is about the difference between creating a category and owning its economics. The company proved, over more than a decade, that urban Indians would treat chai the way they had learned to treat coffee: as a beverage worth queuing for, customising and paying a premium on. But proving that demand existed did not automatically produce a profitable business; it took a forced six-month freeze on growth to fix a customer-experience crisis in 2016, and a pandemic that erased dine-in revenue overnight to force the retail pivot that arguably saved the company. The takeaway for any founder building a physical, high-frequency consumer brand is that the hardest part rarely shows up in the growth numbers — it shows up later, in depreciation schedules, commission lines and cost-of-materials ratios, long after the “we created a category” story has already been told.
Frequently asked questions
Who founded Chaayos and when?
Chaayos was founded in 2012 by Nitin Saluja, an IIT Bombay graduate, and Raghav Verma, an IIT Delhi graduate, who met while working together at the consulting firm Opera Solutions. Their first café opened in Gurugram the same year.
What does “Meri Wali Chai” mean and why does it matter to the business?
“Meri Wali Chai” translates to “my kind of tea” and refers to Chaayos’s core promise of letting each customer customise their tea’s milk, sugar, spice and strength. The company built its in-house Chai Monk brewing machine, introduced in 2016, specifically to deliver this customisation consistently at scale.
Is Chaayos profitable?
Not at the net level. Chaayos turned EBITDA-positive in FY24, at Rs 28.35 crore, and grew that to Rs 37 crore in FY25, but it still posted a net loss of Rs 25.4 crore in FY25 after accounting for depreciation on cafés and machines, platform and franchise commissions, and finance costs.
How much funding has Chaayos raised, and who are its investors?
Chaayos has raised more than $90 million across its funding history, according to Entrackr, with investors including SAIF Partners/Elevation Capital, Think Investments, Tiger Global Management, Alpha Wave Ventures and Alteria Capital (venture debt). Its June 2022 Series C of $45 million, led by Alpha Wave, valued the company at $250 million.
Is Chaayos planning an IPO?
There is no public evidence, as of September 2026, that Chaayos has filed a draft red herring prospectus or announced concrete IPO plans. It remains a private company backed by venture investors.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Entrackr, “Chaayos crosses Rs 300 Cr revenue in FY25; EBITDA jumps 6.5X,” February 2026
- Entrackr, “Chaayos scale remains flat in FY24; turns EBITDA positive,” 2024
- Inc42, “Tiger Global Backed Chaayos Raises $45 Mn In Series C Funding Round,” June 2022
- Business Today, “Chaayos raises $21.5 million in fresh round of funding; to increase store count to 300,” February 2020
- Tracxn, Chaayos company profile and latest shareholding/cap-table data, accessed September 2026 (valuation snapshot dated October 2024)
- Forbes India, “Little Chaos, More Chaayos”
- CNN Business, “Chaayo’s customers upset by use of facial recognition to bill them,” November 2019
- Business Today, “Facial recognition at Chaayos sparks calls for data protection law,” November 2019
- The India Watch, “Chai Point and Chaayos Manages 51% of tea café business in India”
- ScrapeHero, “Number of Chaayos locations in India,” accessed 2026
- Founder Thesis, “The Chai-preneur’s Playbook: How Nitin Saluja Built Chaayos”
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