In 2008, Rashi Narang went looking for a birthday present for her Labrador, Sara, and could not find one worth buying. Eighteen years later the brand that search became, Heads Up For Tails, runs 115 stores and 95 pet spas and is closing in on an annual run-rate of around ₹400 crore — and, on its main operating entity, has still not booked a clean full-year profit.
That gap between visible scale and unproven economics is the whole story of India’s most recognisable premium pet-care brand. Heads Up For Tails helped invent the category it now defends: a market where dogs get orthopaedic beds, cats get grooming spas, and owners pay a premium for treats whose ingredients they can pronounce. It has raised money from Verlinvest, Peak XV (formerly Sequoia Capital India) and, most recently, Dubai’s Apparel Group. It has also spent heavily to build shops and warehouses in a country where organised pet retail barely existed. This deep dive works through what the company sells, how it is put together as a set of legal entities, what its filings actually show, and where the risks sit.
Quick facts
| Company | Heads Up For Tails (brand). India operating entity: Earth Paws Private Limited; Singapore parent: Sara Global Pte Ltd |
| Founded | 2008, New Delhi (now headquartered in Gurugram, Haryana) |
| Founder(s) | Rashi Narang (founder); company profiles also list Ridhima Coelho as co-founder |
| Businesses | Direct-to-consumer premium pet care: pet food, treats, grooming, accessories, wellness; own-brand plus 250+ third-party brands; retail stores, pet spas and online |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹236.8 crore in FY25, standalone Earth Paws Pvt Ltd (Inc42, citing filings) |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Net loss of ₹3.3 crore in FY25, standalone (Inc42) |
| Listed | Private (unlisted) |
| Last valuation | Not publicly disclosed; ~$60–65 million raised in total across rounds (reported) |
| Key shareholders | Verlinvest, Peak XV Partners (ex-Sequoia India), Apparel Group India; founder Rashi Narang |
What they do
Heads Up For Tails (HUFT) is a direct-to-consumer premium pet-care brand. It sells the things a pet owner buys repeatedly — food, treats, grooming products, accessories, beds, toys and wellness items — through its own website and app, its own stores, and third-party marketplaces, and it runs grooming and spa services alongside the product business. As of December 2025 the company reported:
- 115 retail stores and 95 pet spas across more than 18 cities (Entrackr, December 2025)
- More than 13,000 products spanning 250-plus brands, including HUFT’s own-label range (Entrackr, December 2025)
- An omnichannel model — branded e-commerce, physical retail and marketplaces — anchored in India, with a presence in Singapore and stated plans to enter Dubai
The origin
The founding insight was mundane and specific: a good product for a pet you love should not be hard to find, and in 2008 in India it was. Rashi Narang, who had grown up around dogs, went hunting for a birthday gift for her Labrador, Sara, and came back frustrated. Pet shops stocked little that was functional or safe — few well-made toys, poor harnesses, and treats with, in her telling, ingredients she could not pronounce. She decided to make the thing she could not buy.
She started small and self-funded, with roughly ₹5–6 lakh of her own money, per her account to The Established. The first product was a dog bed, designed after she researched fabrics and the way dogs actually lie down. She sold at fairs and exhibitions first, then put up an e-commerce site and opened a kiosk at Select Citywalk mall in New Delhi. The Singapore holding company that later sat above the group, Sara Global Pte Ltd, carries the dog’s name. The brand grew out of a gap a customer felt, not a market study — which is why, for years, HUFT could act as though it owned the premium end of the category by default.
The struggle years
Building a premium category before the customers arrive is slow and expensive, and HUFT’s history has the scars to prove it. Two stretches stand out.
The first was the long early climb. Organised pet retail in India was tiny; demand for premium beds and chemical-free treats had to be created shopper by shopper, exhibition by exhibition. Progress was slow enough that the business ran for well over a decade on modest capital before it took meaningful outside money in 2021.
The second was the pandemic. When Covid-19 emptied malls, footfall at HUFT’s physical stores dropped toward zero, and the company had to lean hard on online sales to survive — a forced acceleration of the omnichannel model it now runs. The financial cost of the subsequent expansion is visible in the filings: on a combined/consolidated basis the group’s net loss widened from ₹18.7 crore in FY22 to ₹76.7 crore in FY23, as total expenses jumped about 65.6% to ₹390.3 crore (Entrackr, April 2024). Growth, in other words, was bought rather than banked.
The turning point
The event that changed HUFT’s trajectory was its August 2021 Series A. The company raised $37 million led by Verlinvest and Sequoia Capital India (now Peak XV Partners), with participation from Amitell Capital and existing backer W&C PetTech (Business Insider, YourStory, August 2021). Before that round it had reportedly raised only about $13 million across its entire life.
The numbers on each side of that round tell the story. On one side: a bootstrapped, roughly ₹5–6 lakh idea that had spent thirteen years proving the category existed, operating around 52 stores with about 215 employees by 2022 (The Established). On the other: capital to build stores, warehouses and a supply chain fast — and combined group revenue that climbed from ₹215.6 crore in FY22 to ₹312.8 crore in FY23 (Entrackr). The Series A turned HUFT from a founder’s conviction into a venture-funded land grab for the premium pet-care shelf.
The money behind it
HUFT is privately held and has never disclosed a headline valuation, but the funding shape is clear from reporting:
- Pre-Series A: approximately $13 million raised in total before 2021 (reported, Inc42).
- Series A — August 2021: $37 million, led by Verlinvest and Sequoia Capital India (now Peak XV Partners), with Amitell Capital and existing investor W&C PetTech participating (Business Insider / YourStory, August 2021).
- Series B — December 2025: a reported ~$25 million round led by Apparel Group India, the Indian arm of Dubai-based retail major Apparel Group, with participation from Malinea Pte Care Limited (Entrackr, December 2025).
What each backer changed: Verlinvest and Sequoia/Peak XV supplied the growth capital and category credibility that took HUFT national after 2021; Apparel Group India is positioned as a strategic backer for the next phase, with the company signalling expansion into Dubai and the wider region. Total capital raised is reported at roughly $60–65 million to date — Entrackr put the figure near $65 million including the Series B, while Crunchbase has listed a lower cumulative figure, so the exact total depends on which undisclosed rounds are counted.
How it makes money
HUFT is, at its core, a retailer of consumables and durables for pets, wrapped in a premium brand and an omnichannel footprint. The mechanics:
- Money in: the overwhelming majority is product sales — food, treats, grooming supplies, accessories, beds and wellness items — sold across own stores, own website/app and marketplaces. Pet products accounted for roughly 93% of revenue in FY23 (Entrackr).
- Services: grooming and pet spas (95 spas reported in December 2025) add a recurring, higher-touch revenue stream and pull owners into stores.
- Costs out: procurement of goods is the dominant cost. In FY23, cost of procurement rose 41.8% to ₹224 crore and made up about 57.5% of total group expenses (Entrackr). Marketing was the other big lever, reported to have jumped sharply that year.
- Where the margin sits: the model leans on own-label products (better gross margin than reselling third-party brands) and on repeat purchases of consumables. The part people get wrong is assuming a well-known brand equals profit — HUFT’s scale is real, but a procurement-heavy cost base plus store and warehouse expansion has kept net margins negative or barely breakeven.
The numbers
A caution before the table: HUFT’s figures come on two different bases, and they should not be read as a single trend line. The FY22 and FY23 figures below are combined/consolidated for the group (the Singapore parent plus the Indian master franchisee and subsidiaries), as reported by Entrackr from filings. The FY24 and FY25 figures are for the standalone Indian operating entity, Earth Paws Private Limited, as reported by Inc42. The apparent step-down from FY23 to FY24 is largely a change in reporting entity, not a collapse in the business.
| Period | Operating revenue (₹ crore) | Net profit/(loss) (₹ crore) | Basis |
| FY22 | 215.6 | (18.7) | Group / consolidated (Entrackr) |
| FY23 | 312.8 | (76.7) | Group / consolidated (Entrackr) |
| FY24 | 199.1 | Not disclosed | Standalone Earth Paws Pvt Ltd (Inc42) |
| FY25 | 236.8 | (3.3) | Standalone Earth Paws Pvt Ltd (Inc42) |
Read on a like-for-like standalone basis, FY25 is the encouraging data point: revenue grew 18.9% year-on-year from ₹199.1 crore ($24.7 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) to ₹236.8 crore, total expenses were ₹240.1 crore, and the net loss narrowed to just ₹3.3 crore — a net margin of about -1.4% (Inc42). On the group side, the FY23 loss of ₹76.7 crore shows how costly the post-2021 expansion was. Separately, at the time of the December 2025 Series B the company was described as running at an annual revenue run-rate of about ₹400 crore (Entrackr) — a run-rate figure, not an audited full-year number, and higher than any single reported statutory revenue.
Where the money comes from
The revenue mix is more concentrated than the sprawling product catalogue suggests:
- Product sales dominate: pet products were about 93% of revenue in FY23 (₹293.51 crore of the combined total), with the remainder from advertising, warehousing and logistics (Entrackr).
- Channel mix is omnichannel: 115 own stores and 95 pet spas across 18-plus cities feed physical demand, while the branded website/app and marketplaces carry online sales (Entrackr, December 2025).
- Geography is India-first: the bulk of the business is domestic, with a presence in Singapore and a stated plan to expand into Dubai and the wider region on the back of the Apparel Group tie-up.
The surprise is how physical the “digital-first” brand really is. A company often described as a D2C pet start-up now carries most of its identity in bricks — more than a hundred stores and nearly a hundred spas — which is exactly what makes the cost base heavy.
The risks
- Thin, unproven profitability. Even in its best reported year the standalone entity lost money (₹3.3 crore in FY25 on ₹240.1 crore of expenses), and the group posted a ₹76.7 crore loss in FY23. With procurement at roughly 57.5% of expenses, gross margin has to do a lot of work before store and marketing costs are covered; a mis-step on inventory or discounting quickly erases the wafer-thin margin.
- Capital-intensive physical expansion. Running 115 stores and 95 spas while still loss-making means fixed costs — rent, staff, warehousing — scale with the footprint. Each new city has to reach payback before it helps the P&L, and retail expansion funded by equity is only sustainable while investors keep writing cheques.
- Rising competition and category dependence. The premium pet category HUFT helped create now attracts well-funded rivals (Supertails, Wiggles and others) plus horizontal marketplaces such as Amazon and Flipkart that can undercut on price. With about 93% of revenue tied to pet products, any slowdown in discretionary premium spending, or a price war, hits the core directly.
The takeaway
Heads Up For Tails is a case study in the cost of being early. Rashi Narang did not find a market and enter it; she spent more than a decade convincing Indian owners that a pet was worth spending on, and by the time capital arrived in 2021 she owned the premium shelf almost by default. The transferable lesson is that first-mover advantage in a category you have to build is real but slow to monetise: the brand equity compounds for years before the unit economics do. The open question for HUFT is whether the store-and-spa network that made it the default name can be run at a profit — the narrowing FY25 loss suggests it is getting closer, but the answer is not yet in the filings.
Frequently asked questions
Who founded Heads Up For Tails and when?
Rashi Narang founded Heads Up For Tails in 2008 in New Delhi, self-funding it with roughly ₹5–6 lakh after she could not find good products for her Labrador, Sara. Company profiles (Inc42, Tracxn) also list Ridhima Coelho as a co-founder. The company is now headquartered in Gurugram, Haryana.
What is the legal entity behind the brand?
The brand operates through a group structure. Its Indian operating entity and master franchisee is Earth Paws Private Limited, sitting under a Singapore parent, Sara Global Pte Ltd, with subsidiaries including Barkyard Private Limited and Precious Pet Services Private Limited (Entrackr, Inc42).
How much money has Heads Up For Tails raised?
Reported funding includes about $13 million before 2021, a $37 million Series A in August 2021 led by Verlinvest and Sequoia Capital India (now Peak XV), and a reported ~$25 million Series B in December 2025 led by Apparel Group India. Total raised is reported at roughly $60–65 million.
Is Heads Up For Tails profitable?
Not on a clean full-year basis yet. Its standalone Indian entity, Earth Paws Pvt Ltd, narrowed its net loss to ₹3.3 crore in FY25 on revenue of ₹236.8 crore, per Inc42. On a combined group basis, it reported a net loss of ₹76.7 crore in FY23 (Entrackr).
How big is Heads Up For Tails today?
As of December 2025 the company reported 115 retail stores and 95 pet spas across more than 18 cities, more than 13,000 products across 250-plus brands, and an annual revenue run-rate of about ₹400 crore (Entrackr).
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Entrackr — “Heads Up For Tails revenue crosses Rs 300 Cr in FY23; losses mount” (April 2024)
- Entrackr — “Heads Up For Tails to raise $25 Mn in Series B led by Apparel Group” (December 2025)
- Inc42 — Heads Up For Tails company profile and financials pages (2026)
- Business Insider India — “Pet care company Heads Up For Tails bags $37 million” (August 2021)
- YourStory — funding alert, Heads Up For Tails Series A (August 2021)
- The Established — “Rising Stars: Meet Rashi Narang, the founder of Heads Up For Tails”
- Tracxn — Heads Up For Tails company profile (2026)
- Crunchbase — Heads Up For Tails organisation profile (funding)
- Trading Economics — USD/INR reference rate (September 2026)
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