Site icon The Invincible India

Startup Deep Dive : FirstCry — India’s largest baby retailer still hasn’t booked a full-year profit

The Invincible India
The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for FirstCry.

FirstCry listed on the NSE and BSE on 13 August 2024 at an issue price of Rs 465 a share. The stock closed that first day at Rs 673.50, up 44.8%, taking parent company Brainbees Solutions to a market capitalisation of Rs 34,967 crore, about $4.1 billion at the exchange rate that day, as per a YourStory calculation. It was, on paper, one of the most successful consumer-internet listings India had seen.

The contradiction: the company had never made a full-year profit in its 14 years of existence, and it still has not. Brainbees reported a consolidated net loss of Rs 321.51 crore for the very financial year (FY24) in which it went public. By September 2026 the market had marked its verdict down hard — the stock traded near Rs 170, valuing the company at roughly Rs 9,000-9,500 crore ($1 billion at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026, Trading Economics), a fall of about three-quarters from listing-day levels. This is the story of how a baby-products retailer built India’s largest omnichannel platform in its category, spun off a logistics unicorn along the way, and is still trying to prove that scale in a low-margin, discretionary business turns into durable profit.

Quick facts

Company Brainbees Solutions Limited, operating as FirstCry
Founded September 2010, Pune
Founder(s) Supam Maheshwari and Amitava Saha
Businesses FirstCry multichannel retail (online plus 1,000+ stores), private labels including BabyHug, international operations in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and GlobalBees, a majority-owned D2C brand roll-up
Latest FY revenue Rs 7,659.61 crore, revenue from operations, FY25 (year to March 2025)
Latest FY profit/loss Consolidated net loss of Rs 191.47 crore, FY25
Listed 13 August 2024, NSE and BSE (ticker FIRSTCRY)
Market value / last valuation About Rs 9,000-9,500 crore as of September 2026, down from a debut-day Rs 34,967 crore ($4.1 billion)
Key shareholders SoftBank (about 25.5%), Mahindra & Mahindra (about 11%), Premji Invest (about 10%), founders and other PE investors including TPG and ChrysCapital

What they do

FirstCry sells everything a household needs from pregnancy through early childhood: diapers, feeding and nursing gear, skincare, toys, clothing and school essentials, sourced from more than 6,000 brands alongside its own private labels. It reaches customers through firstcry.com and its app, and through a network the company describes as more than 1,000 owned and franchised stores across 500-plus Indian cities, plus online operations in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The customer is almost always a parent or a gifting relative, and the company’s own positioning, repeated in broker notes on the stock, is that it is India’s largest multichannel retailing platform for mothers’, babies’ and kids’ products by gross merchandise value (GMV), a ranking Redseer has given it as of FY24.

The origin

Supam Maheshwari, an engineer from Delhi College of Engineering and an IIM Ahmedabad graduate, had already built and sold one company, the e-learning firm Brainvisa Technologies, before he turned to baby products. The founding insight came from his own life: as a new father in the late 2000s, he found that good-quality baby products in India were either unavailable, unbranded, or had to be brought back from trips abroad. He teamed up with Amitava Saha, an IIT Varanasi and IIM Lucknow graduate who had run operations at Brainvisa, and the two put in about Rs 2.5 crore of personal and friends-and-family money to start Brainbees Solutions in Pune in September 2010, launching FirstCry.com the same year to organise what was then an estimated $12 billion, deeply fragmented Indian baby-care market.

The struggle years

The first hard call came within a year. In June 2011, with the company barely funded — its Series A of about $4 million from SAIF Partners had only just closed — FirstCry opened its first physical, franchise-owned store. Investors, backing an online business, questioned why a dot-com startup needed brick-and-mortar at all; capital was scarce enough in early-stage Indian e-commerce that the move looked like a distraction rather than a strategy. The founders’ reasoning was that Indian parents, especially outside the metros, wanted to see, touch and try baby products, particularly clothing and footwear, before paying for them, so an online-only model would cap the addressable market. FirstCry followed the first store with a further round of $14 million from IDG Ventures and SAIF Partners in early 2012, using part of it to keep opening stores against investor scepticism.

A second, quieter struggle played out in logistics. Third-party delivery in smaller Indian towns in the early 2010s was unreliable and expensive for a catalogue of bulky, fragile items like strollers and feeding bottles. In 2012, Saha built an in-house delivery arm, FirstCry Express, under a self-imposed rule that it match third-party cost per delivery with zero capital expenditure. It worked well enough that other e-commerce founders who were also FirstCry’s warehousing customers began asking to use the same network, and in 2015 the company spun the unit off as an independent business, Xpressbees, which has since become a logistics unicorn valued at about $1.4 billion in its own right — a rare case of a struggle-era fix turning into a second, separate company.

The most recent near-miss was regulatory rather than operational. FirstCry filed its draft IPO papers in late 2023, but the Securities and Exchange Board of India flagged that the filing had disclosed financials only up to the first quarter of FY24, short of a 2022 SEBI rule requiring three years of the same metrics shared with pre-IPO investors. The company withdrew and refiled in April 2024, this time disclosing revenue of Rs 4,814 crore and a net loss of Rs 278 crore for the nine months to December 2023, along with customer and order metrics it had not previously made public. The episode cost the company weeks of momentum in a fragile listings window.

The turning point

If there is a single event that separates “large, unprofitable startup” from “large, unprofitable public company,” it is listing day itself, 13 August 2024. Going in, banks and pre-IPO secondary trades had priced Brainbees at about $2.9 billion. By the closing bell, the stock’s 44.8% first-day pop had pushed that to roughly $4.1 billion (Rs 34,967 crore), on a company that had booked a net loss of Rs 321.51 crore on revenue of Rs 6,575.08 crore for the year just ended. The market was pricing GMV leadership and omnichannel scale; the balance sheet was still printing red ink. Both things were true on the same day, and the eighteen months since have mostly been the market re-pricing which one matters more — the stock’s all-time high came two months later, on 15 October 2024 at Rs 734.25, before a long slide to an all-time low of Rs 291 in May 2025 and further down to the Rs 160s-170s range by early-to-mid 2026.

The money behind it

FirstCry has raised roughly $955.6 million in private capital across eleven rounds before its IPO, according to Crunchbase-sourced deal tracking, on top of the Rs 1,816 crore of fresh equity it later raised from the public markets. Three backers shaped the company the most. SoftBank’s Vision Fund led a Series E of about $400 million between 2019 and 2020, at the time India’s largest funding round in the baby-care category, and emerged as the largest shareholder at about 25.5% post-IPO. In 2019, TPG, ChrysCapital and Premji Invest together bought roughly $315 million of stock in a deal that valued FirstCry at about $1.9-2.1 billion, mostly a secondary sale that let earlier investors and the founders take some money off the table while keeping their operating roles. Mahindra & Mahindra came in as a strategic investor and held about 11% at listing, adding retail and distribution credibility rather than just capital. By April 2023, reports said SoftBank was exploring a partial exit at a $3 billion valuation, well below the peak private marks the company had commanded — an early signal, a year before the IPO, that growth investors were no longer willing to underwrite the same multiples they had in 2021.

How it makes money

FirstCry runs three distinct engines under one balance sheet: an India multichannel business (the website, app and stores), an international online business in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and GlobalBees, a majority-owned vehicle that buys and scales small Indian direct-to-consumer brands. Within India multichannel, revenue comes from three different economics stacked on top of each other. First, third-party marketplace sales, where FirstCry takes a commission reported in the 18-28% range depending on category, plus fixed fees and shipping, similar to any horizontal marketplace. Second, wholesale or first-party sales of other brands’ products, where FirstCry buys stock and resells it at a retail margin, commonly 35-50% off MRP. Third, and most consequential, its own private labels — BabyHug, Pine Kids, Cutewalk and others — which it designs, sources and prices itself, capturing full retail margin with no commission leakage to a third-party brand.

The part outside observers usually get wrong is treating FirstCry as primarily a marketplace, the way they would Amazon or Flipkart. In practice, private labels have grown from about 37% of India multichannel GMV six years ago to more than 58% today, by the company’s own disclosures cited in industry analysis, and it is this house-brand share — not marketplace take-rate — that determines whether the India business is profitable in a given quarter. That is also why the category the company is most exposed to when things go wrong is the one with the thinnest private-label share: diapers, a largely branded, commoditised segment that analysts estimate at about 15% of GMV, where FirstCry resells rather than manufactures and has to match aggressive discounting from horizontal e-commerce and quick-commerce apps rather than set its own price.

The numbers

Revenue has grown every year disclosed publicly, roughly tripling from FY22 to FY25, while losses have been volatile rather than steadily shrinking — they widened sharply in FY23, before narrowing in FY24 and again in FY25. Figures below are revenue from operations and consolidated net loss, in Rs crore, as disclosed in the company’s DRHP and subsequent exchange filings.

Fiscal year Revenue from operations (Rs crore) Consolidated net loss (Rs crore)
FY22 2,401 79
FY23 5,632 486
FY24 6,481 321.5
FY25 7,659.6 191.5

Two things sit alongside the headline loss line. Adjusted EBITDA margin, the company’s preferred operating metric, improved to 5.1% in FY25 from 4.2% in FY24, and cash profit after tax nearly doubled to about Rs 209 crore, with the India multichannel business turning both PAT- and free-cash-flow-positive at the segment level for the first time, as reported in the company’s FY25 results commentary. GMV, a scale measure rather than a profit measure, rose from Rs 9,121 crore in FY24 to Rs 10,585 crore in FY25, an increase of about 16%. The gap between a positive core India segment and a negative consolidated total is explained largely by continuing losses at the international business and integration costs at GlobalBees.

Where the money comes from

India multichannel remains the overwhelming majority of both revenue and GMV; in the September 2025 quarter (Q2 FY26) alone it brought in about Rs 1,381 crore, up 8% year-on-year, according to the company’s own quarterly disclosures. International — the UAE and Saudi Arabia online business — is smaller and structurally less mature: revenue there rose 13% year-on-year to about Rs 236 crore in the same quarter, with adjusted EBITDA losses narrowing by about 22.3% but not yet closing. GlobalBees, the D2C roll-up, is the segment most exposed to execution risk: it was capitalised with as much as $150 million at one point across investors including SoftBank, TPG, ChrysCapital and Premji Invest, has taken stakes in brands such as The Butternut Co and The Better Home, and FirstCry raised its own stake in the vehicle to above 51% for majority control by putting in a further Rs 146 crore. The surprise for anyone assuming FirstCry is simply “the baby Amazon” is how much of its GMV growth and margin improvement now depends on owning brands outright — through BabyHug in-house and through GlobalBees’ acquired portfolio — rather than on selling other people’s products at a commission.

The risks

The clearest and most immediate risk is category-level price competition. Diaper pricing, contested by horizontal e-commerce players and newer quick-commerce apps, is estimated to be around 15% of GMV but has been squeezing gross margin by more than a hundred basis points in some quarters as FirstCry matches discounts to defend volume, a dynamic the company itself has flagged as “heightened competitive intensity in the diaper category” in its results commentary. Second is a scale-versus-share mismatch that is easy to misread: FirstCry is the largest organised player in its category by GMV, but Redseer-based estimates put its overall share of India’s total childcare market at only about 2.5-3%, rising to roughly 16-17% within the organised segment alone — meaning most of the category is still unorganised, and “market leader” does not currently translate into pricing power over the wider market. Third is concentration in a single, discretionary consumer segment: unlike more diversified retailers, Brainbees’ fortunes move almost entirely with parents’ willingness to spend on non-essential baby and kids products, so any slowdown in urban discretionary spending or in birth rates hits the top line directly, with no other category to lean on. A fourth, related risk sits inside GlobalBees: a roll-up of small D2C brands depends on picking winners and integrating them without destroying the founder-led culture that made them work in the first place, and neither outcome is guaranteed at the pace FirstCry has been acquiring.

The takeaway

FirstCry’s most transferable lesson is not about baby products at all: a company can win the metric investors reward early — GMV, category leadership, store count — for a decade, and still have to prove a completely different metric, sustained consolidated profit, once it is public and quarterly numbers are marked to a share price every day. The pivot to offline stores in 2011, the in-house logistics build that became Xpressbees, and the recent tilt toward owned private labels all share a pattern: FirstCry repeatedly chose to build the harder, capital-intensive thing that critics or investors doubted, rather than the cheaper thing that scaled faster on paper. That approach built the largest platform in its category. Whether it can also build a platform that earns a full-year profit, something it has not done in fifteen years of operating, is still an open question the market is actively pricing down.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded FirstCry and when?

Supam Maheshwari and Amitava Saha founded Brainbees Solutions in Pune in September 2010, launching FirstCry.com the same year with about Rs 2.5 crore of personal and friends-and-family capital.

Has FirstCry ever been profitable?

No full financial year of profit has been publicly disclosed. The company reported consolidated net losses of Rs 79 crore in FY22, Rs 486 crore in FY23, Rs 321.5 crore in FY24 and Rs 191.5 crore in FY25, even as its India multichannel segment turned PAT-positive at the segment level in FY25.

Who are FirstCry’s biggest shareholders after its IPO?

SoftBank holds about 25.5%, Mahindra & Mahindra about 11%, and Premji Invest about 10%, alongside the founders and other pre-IPO investors including TPG and ChrysCapital, based on shareholding details reported around the August 2024 listing.

What is GlobalBees and how does it relate to FirstCry?

GlobalBees is a D2C brand roll-up vehicle, backed by the same investor group as FirstCry, that acquires or takes stakes in small Indian direct-to-consumer brands such as The Butternut Co and The Better Home. FirstCry has invested further capital, including Rs 146 crore in one tranche, to take its stake in GlobalBees above 51% for majority control.

Why has FirstCry’s stock fallen so much since listing?

After debuting at a market cap of about Rs 34,967 crore ($4.1 billion) on 13 August 2024 and peaking near Rs 734 a share in October 2024, the stock fell to an all-time low of Rs 291 in May 2025 and traded around Rs 168-172 in September 2026, a fall analysts have linked to intensifying diaper-category price competition from quick-commerce and e-commerce rivals, persistent consolidated losses, and margin pressure, even as revenue kept growing.

Sources

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

Found an error? Write to us and we’ll correct it in the open, dated, on the piece.

Exit mobile version