Startup Deep Dive : Ferns N Petals — it books Rs 861 crore but still loses money

In FY25, Ferns N Petals booked ₹861.5 crore ($89.7 million) in operating revenue and still lost ₹22 crore, thirty-one years after a Delhi florist decided flowers deserved to be sold with the polish of a proper retail brand. The company that calls itself India’s largest florist and gifting chain has never turned an annual profit on record, has burned through one failed food business that left its founder “on the footpath,” and survived a pandemic that froze 98 percent of its doorstep-delivery model overnight.

That contradiction — scale without profit, three decades of growth without a single reported profitable year in its available filings — is the story of Ferns N Petals (FNP). It is also, per its own founder, a story about what happens when a company strays from its core competence, and what it costs to come back.

Quick facts

What they do

Ferns N Petals sells flowers, cakes and gifts to Indians and members of the Indian diaspora who want to mark an occasion without doing the legwork themselves: a birthday, an anniversary, Valentine’s Day, Rakhi, Diwali, a condolence, or a wedding. The business runs across owned and franchised retail stores, an app and website, and a same-day and often same-hour delivery network, with a parallel wedding and event-decor arm that plans and executes venue décor for weddings and corporate events. Outside India, FNP operates retail and delivery businesses in the UAE, Singapore and Qatar, serving both resident and diaspora demand.

The origin

The idea did not come from a business plan. Vikaas Gutgutia has recounted that the trigger was watching a florist deliver a shabby, thrown-together bouquet to his girlfriend on her birthday — an ordinary Delhi transaction that embarrassed him and, in his telling, convinced him that flowers in India deserved the same quality control and presentation that organised retail was starting to bring to other categories. In 1994 he opened a 200-square-foot shop in South Extension, New Delhi, with four employees, funded by roughly ₹2.5 lakh borrowed from a friend. There was no elaborate cold-chain or franchise model at the start — just a bet that a customer would pay more for a bouquet that did not look like it came off a pavement stall, in a market where pavement stalls were exactly what most Indians bought from.

The struggle years

The florist-with-standards idea did not pay off quickly. By Gutgutia’s own account, it took seven years for that first outlet to turn a profit, a stretch in which rentals kept rising, funds kept running short, and at one particularly bleak point he was reduced to selling flowers off the pavement himself, the very trade he had set out to professionalise. He has said the thought that kept him going was simple: there was no question of quitting.

The second, more severe setback came after FNP had already found its footing. Around 2007-08, Gutgutia diversified into food, launching a street-food venture called Chatak Chaat. It was, by his own admission years later, a decision driven by desire rather than competence: “food was not my competence, it was more of a desire.” The venture ran for roughly four years and ate into the gains FNP had built, pushing Gutgutia into serious debt. He has described 2009-10, when Chatak Chaat finally collapsed, in blunt terms: “I was literally on the footpath. I had nothing in 2009-10.” He calls the recovery that followed his “second journey” — a rebuild that kept every subsequent diversification (weddings, funerals, digital gifting) inside the gifting and life-events domain FNP already understood, rather than outside it.

The turning point

The event that reshaped FNP’s business model happened in 1997, three years after the South Extension shop opened. A chance acquaintance with an executive at Delhi’s Taj Palace Hotel turned into a contract to supply and arrange flowers for a wedding at the hotel — a single booking reported to have fetched Gutgutia around half a crore rupees, an enormous sum against a business that was still finding its feet, plus the kind of word-of-mouth credibility that no advertising budget could have bought at the time. That one wedding is the reason FNP has a weddings-and-events arm today: what started as a one-off decor job for a five-star hotel became, in the company’s own account, its largest and most profitable line of business, distinct from the transactional bouquet-and-cake orders that make up the bulk of daily revenue.

The money behind it

For a company founded in 1994, FNP took an unusually long time to raise institutional capital, funding three decades of expansion mostly through internal accruals and franchise capital rather than venture money.

• March 2022 — Lighthouse India Fund III: FNP’s first and, as of September 2026, only disclosed institutional round: ₹200 crore ($27 million), described by Lighthouse as an investment in “India’s leading gifting platform” (Business Standard, March 2022; Lighthouse Funds, March 2022). Post-money valuation was not disclosed by either party.
• Total raised to date: $27 million (₹200 crore) across one formal institutional round, per Tracxn’s funding tracker (accessed September 2026).
• November 2025 — talks for a new round: FNP, still backed only by Lighthouse among institutional investors, was reported to be in early discussions to raise up to $40 million, with investment bank Ambit Capital engaged to run the process (Whalesbook, 5 November 2025). This round was described as likely to be FNP’s last private raise before a public listing.
• IPO intent: the company has talked publicly about listing within roughly 24-36 months of the prospective 2025-26 raise, which points to a listing around 2028; no DRHP had been filed with SEBI and no exchange, bankers or issue size had been named as of September 2026 (Whalesbook, 5 November 2025).

How it makes money

FNP’s revenue is overwhelmingly transactional retail, not a marketplace or subscription model, and its cost base is dominated by two line items: what goes into the product, and what it costs to make people buy it.

• Product sales (flowers, cakes, gifts): ₹781 crore, or about 91 percent of FY25 operating revenue, up 22 percent year-on-year from ₹641 crore in FY24 (Entrackr, February 2026).
• Services revenue (delivery/convenience charges, franchise fees and similar): roughly ₹80 crore in FY25, up 25 percent year-on-year (Entrackr, February 2026). In FY24, delivery charges alone were ₹45.12 crore, up 40 percent, alongside ₹19.51 crore from franchise fees and convenience charges (Entrackr, November 2024).
• Weddings and events: the company’s own account traces its highest-margin business to the 1997 Taj Palace contract, though FNP’s recent filings do not break this out as a separate disclosed line — it sits within the aggregated product and services revenue.
• Newer lines added under pressure: digital gifting (video greetings, e-gift cards, virtual experiences) launched in March 2020, and last-rites/funeral services launched in Delhi-NCR the same year — both explained in more detail under the turning points of the pandemic era below.
• Cost of materials (flowers, cake ingredients, gifting stock) was ₹379 crore in FY25, about 43 percent of total expenses, up 21.5 percent year-on-year (Entrackr, February 2026).
• Advertising was ₹184 crore in FY25 (about 21 percent of total expenses), up 17 percent year-on-year — a reminder that gifting is an occasion-triggered, marketing-dependent purchase rather than a habitual one (Entrackr, February 2026).
• Employee benefit expense was ₹146 crore in FY25, up 18 percent year-on-year (Entrackr, February 2026).
• The part people get wrong: FNP’s scale (hundreds of stores, dozens of countries served for delivery) reads like a high-margin retail brand, but its own numbers show it spent roughly ₹1.03 for every ₹1 of revenue earned in FY25, and has not reported a profitable fiscal year in the filings reviewed here (Entrackr, February 2026).

The numbers

All figures below are FNP’s standalone operating revenue and net profit/loss as reported in its Ministry of Corporate Affairs filings and compiled by Entrackr; unit is ₹ crore.

• Revenue grew 16 percent in FY24 and 22 percent in FY25 (Entrackr, November 2024 and February 2026).
• The net loss narrowed 77.8 percent in FY24 and a further 8.3 percent in FY25 — a much slower rate of improvement, even as revenue kept climbing (Entrackr, November 2024 and February 2026).
• FY25 EBITDA margin was reported at -1.25 percent and return on capital employed at -29.13 percent (Entrackr, February 2026).
• Cash and bank balances stood at ₹74 crore in FY25, down from ₹84 crore in FY24 (Entrackr, February 2026 and November 2024).
• Separately, FNP’s Global CEO has said the company achieved “EBITDA positivity” in FY25 and is targeting profit-after-tax by the end of FY26 on projected revenue of about ₹1,100 crore (Whalesbook, 13 October 2025) — a claim from company leadership that sits alongside, rather than replacing, the MCA-filing-based EBITDA margin above; both are reported here because they conflict.

Where the money comes from

FNP is overwhelmingly an Indian revenue story with small, disproportionately loud international outposts. In FY24, the most recent year for which a geographic split is available in its filings:

• India: ₹443.58 crore, or about 63 percent of operating revenue (Entrackr, November 2024).
• UAE: ₹176.52 crore.
• Singapore: ₹65.1 crore.

The surprise is less the split itself than what it implies about lean overseas operations: as of the pandemic period, FNP’s Dubai business ran on a team of around 100 people and its Singapore business on around 25, yet together those two markets accounted for roughly 37 percent of FY24 operating revenue — a far higher revenue-per-employee showing than the sprawling, franchise-heavy Indian network (Forbes India, January 2021; Entrackr, November 2024). During the strictest phase of India’s 2020 lockdown, FNP’s Dubai unit posted 170 percent sales growth even as the Indian business froze, underlining how much the two geographies now behave like separate businesses riding the same brand.

The risks

• Structurally thin, and still negative, margins: FNP has reported a net loss in each of the three fiscal years for which figures are available here (FY23 through FY25), and its FY25 EBITDA margin was -1.25 percent even after two straight years of double-digit revenue growth (Entrackr, February 2026). Growth alone has not yet been enough to fix the cost structure.
• Revenue that depends on paid demand generation, not repeat habit: gifting is occasion-triggered rather than routine, and FNP’s advertising spend of ₹184 crore in FY25 (21 percent of total expenses, up 17 percent year-on-year) shows how much marketing muscle is required to keep converting those occasions into orders (Entrackr, February 2026). Any pullback in ad spend risks a direct hit to top-line growth.
• A perishable, logistics-heavy delivery promise: before the pandemic, roughly 98 percent of FNP’s business involved doorstep delivery of fresh or time-sensitive goods, and when India’s 2020 lockdown disrupted logistics, the company’s online orders fell more than 80 percent even as it stayed open, with an overall business impact estimated at 15-20 percent (Forbes India, January 2021). Flowers and cakes cannot be warehoused through a disruption the way durable goods can.
• A documented history of diversification going wrong: FNP’s own founder has pointed to the 2007-2010 Chatak Chaat food venture as proof that stepping outside gifting and life-events into an unrelated category (“food was not my competence”) can erase years of gains and create serious debt (TheCore.in, August 2023). It is a risk the company has largely managed since by keeping newer lines — weddings, funerals, digital gifts — inside its core domain, but the scar from that earlier lesson is on the record.

The takeaway

The lesson FNP’s own founder draws from three decades in business is not about flowers at all. It is about the discipline of staying inside your circle of competence even when a business is generating cash and confidence enough to wander outside it. Gutgutia built a profitable-enough florist, used its early success to fund an unrelated food venture built on desire rather than expertise, lost most of what he had built, and rebuilt by refusing to make the same mistake twice — every subsequent expansion, from weddings to funerals to digital gifting, has stayed inside the same underlying skill: turning a life occasion into a delivered product. The transferable idea is not “diversify” or “don’t diversify.” It is that the boundary of what a company is good at is usually narrower than its balance sheet makes it feel, and the cost of finding that boundary the hard way can take years to repay.

Frequently asked questions

What does Ferns N Petals actually sell?

Flowers, cakes and gifts sold through retail stores, franchises, an app and a website, mostly for occasions like birthdays, anniversaries, Valentine’s Day and festivals, alongside a separate wedding and event-decor business and, since 2020, digital gifts and last-rites services.

Who founded Ferns N Petals, and when?

Vikaas Gutgutia founded FNP in 1994 in New Delhi, starting with a 200-square-foot shop in South Extension; his wife Meeta Gutgutia is credited as co-founder, having led the company’s design direction and its move into e-commerce.

Is Ferns N Petals profitable?

Not on the fiscal years reviewed here. FNP reported net losses of ₹109.5 crore in FY23, ₹24.3 crore in FY24 and ₹22 crore in FY25, per Ministry of Corporate Affairs filings compiled by Entrackr, even as revenue grew each year. Company leadership has separately said FNP reached EBITDA positivity in FY25 and is targeting profit-after-tax by the end of FY26 (Whalesbook, October 2025).

How much funding has Ferns N Petals raised, and is it planning an IPO?

FNP has raised one disclosed institutional round: ₹200 crore ($27 million) from Lighthouse India Fund III in March 2022. As of September 2026 it was reported to be in early talks to raise up to $40 million more via Ambit Capital, in what would likely be its last private round before a targeted listing around 2028; no DRHP had been filed.

Is Ferns N Petals really India’s largest florist?

It is widely described in the media as India’s largest organised florist and gifting chain, and founder Vikaas Gutgutia has said FNP commands about one-third of India’s organised flower market — a company-stated figure rather than an independently audited market-share number, so it should be read as a claim, not an exact measurement.

Sources

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

• Entrackr (Fintrackr) — “FNP posts Rs 861 Cr revenue in FY25; cuts losses”, February 2026
• Entrackr (Fintrackr) — “FNP crosses Rs 700 Cr revenue in FY24; losses drop by 78%”, November 2024
• Scroll.in — “Ferns N Petals: How a small South Delhi shop bloomed into Indians’ chosen florist”, September 2017
• The Weekend Leader — “Vikaas Gutgutia: Founder and Managing Director of Ferns N Petals”
• TheCore.in — “‘Stick To Your Core Competence’: FNP Founder Vikaas Gutgutia On Early Business Diversification”, August 2023
• Forbes India — “Ferns N Petals: Bloom after the gloom”, January 2021
• Business Standard — “Ferns N Petals gets Rs 200 cr funding from Lighthouse India Fund III”, March 2022
• Lighthouse Funds — “Lighthouse invests USD 27 million (INR 200 crores) in Ferns N Petals, India’s leading gifting platform”, March 2022
• Whalesbook — “Ferns N Petals in Talks to Raise $40 Million for Expansion, Eyes IPO”, 5 November 2025
• Whalesbook — “Ferns N Petals Turns Profitable, Targets Rs 1,100 Crore Revenue by FY26 Amid Expansion”, 13 October 2025
• YourStory — company and smbstory profiles of Ferns N Petals, on founder market-share statement and business overview
• Tracxn — Ferns N Petals company and funding profile, accessed September 2026

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