A company backed by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin told the press in January 2022 that it had “turned profitable.” Sixteen months later, its own regulatory filings showed a net loss that had widened 3.7 times over, to ₹17.75 crore. That company is Hopscotch, India’s best-known online-first kidswear brand, and the gap between the press release and the paperwork is the real story of how it got to a genuine ₹11.5 crore profit only in FY25.
Hopscotch sells clothes, footwear and accessories for children aged up to 14, mostly through its own app and website, to parents in India’s smaller cities who cannot walk into a Zara Kids or H&M Kids store. It has raised $71 million (₹681 crore at ₹96.0 to the dollar) since 2012 from names as varied as an RPG Group venture fund and Amazon itself, has cut its own product range by 80% in the past year to fix its margins, and only now, fourteen years in, looks like a business that reliably makes money rather than one that occasionally announces it does.
Quick facts
| Company | Hopscotch (Hopscotch Wholesale Trading Pvt Ltd) |
| Founded | October 2012, Mumbai |
| Founder(s) | Rahul Anand and Lisa Kennedy, both former Quidsi (Diapers.com) executives |
| Businesses | Online-first kidswear D2C brand (apparel, footwear, accessories, ages 0-14); also sells via Amazon, Flipkart and Myntra marketplaces |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹265.0 crore (about $27.6 million), FY25 (year to March 2025), up 20.2% year-on-year |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Net profit of ₹11.5 crore, FY25 |
| Listed | Private; no IPO announced as of September 2026 |
| Market value / last valuation | Not disclosed by the company or investors; $71 million raised cumulatively as of May 2023 |
| Key shareholders / CEO | Rahul Anand (Founder and CEO); investors include Eduardo Saverin’s EE Capital, RPG Ventures, Amazon, Lionrock Capital and IIFL Seed Venture Fund |
What they do
Hopscotch is an internet-first retailer of clothing, footwear and accessories for children from birth to around 14 years old, sold mainly through its own app and website to parents across India, with apparel making up 91% of sales as of November 2025, as per DFU Publications. Roughly 85-90% of that revenue comes through Hopscotch’s own platform rather than marketplaces, and 65% of demand originates outside India’s metro cities, as reported by DFU Publications in November 2025, which is the company’s way of saying its real customer is a mother in a tier-2 or tier-3 town who has no nearby store carrying the kind of clothes she wants for her child.
The origin
Rahul Anand and Lisa Kennedy launched Hopscotch in October 2012, as reported by YourStory at the time. Both were Harvard Business School alumni who had worked at Quidsi, the New Jersey company behind Diapers.com that Amazon acquired in 2010 for $545 million; Kennedy had been Quidsi’s EVP of e-commerce, and Anand had built its pricing and inventory algorithms. They noticed that Indian parents shopping for their children were stuck between unaffordable imported labels and uninspired local ones, with almost nothing in between that felt current. Hopscotch’s first version was closer to a curated marketplace than a brand of its own: it worked with roughly 3,000 Indian and international labels and took a 35% commission on each sale, according to a Whizsky case study of the business. The idea was not to manufacture clothes but to be the single place a time-pressed parent would trust to have already done the sorting.
The struggle years
The commission marketplace model that got Hopscotch off the ground also capped how much it could ever earn from a sale, and it left the company dependent on other brands’ production schedules and stock availability. By the middle of the decade Hopscotch had begun shifting toward its own private-label design and manufacturing, a change that let it compress its design-to-shelf cycle and stopped it competing purely on which seller had the best-known logo. That shift did not immediately show up as profit. Hopscotch lost ₹4.86 crore in FY21 and, instead of narrowing, that loss jumped 3.7 times to ₹17.75 crore in FY22, even as revenue grew 15.7% year-on-year to ₹235.7 crore, as per Entrackr’s reporting in May 2023, which cited the company’s own filings. The pattern repeated in FY23: revenue fell to ₹193.71 crore, according to Inc42 Datalabs, a rare year in which the top line went backward rather than merely growing more slowly. By late 2025 Hopscotch’s own strategy shift made the underlying problem explicit: the company had been carrying roughly 40,000 live seasonal styles at once, an assortment so wide that individual designs sold too little to be profitable, and it began cutting that number toward 5,000-6,000 over 12 to 18 months, as reported by DFU Publications in November 2025.
The turning point
January 2022 is the moment Hopscotch chose to tell its own turnaround story: it announced an annualised gross merchandise value of ₹650 crore, said it had turned profitable, and set a target of crossing ₹1,000 crore in annualised revenue within the year, as reported by Business Standard. On the other side of that announcement sit the numbers that were actually filed with the registrar for the year that followed: a net loss of ₹17.75 crore in FY22, not a profit, and revenue of ₹235.7 crore, well short of the ₹1,000 crore target, as per Entrackr’s May 2023 report. The two accounts are not contradictory so much as they measure different things — an EBITDA or operating view against a full net-loss view that includes funding costs, depreciation and one-off charges — but the distance between the story told to the press and the number filed with regulators is exactly the gap that a company narrating its own turnaround has an incentive to leave unexplained. It took until FY24, according to Inc42 Datalabs, for Hopscotch to post an actual net profit of ₹3.1 crore on ₹220.5 crore of revenue, and until FY25 for that profit to look durable at ₹11.5 crore on ₹265.0 crore of revenue.
The money behind it
- Series B: $11 million, led by Velos Partners, January 2015 (Whizsky case study)
- Series C: $13 million, led by Eduardo Saverin, February 2016 (TechCrunch, February 2016) — Saverin’s first cheque into the company and his first India retail bet, later followed through EE Capital, his investment vehicle
- Series D: $25 million, September 2020, from EE Capital (Eduardo Saverin), Lionrock Capital, Rise Capital, RPG Ventures and IIFL Seed Venture Fund (Entrackr, September 2020) — RPG Ventures, the venture arm of the CEAT and Raychem-owning RPG Group, brought access to an established Indian retail and manufacturing network rather than just capital
- Series E: $20 million, May 2023, led by Amazon with continued participation from Eduardo Saverin, RPG Ventures, Lionrock and IIFL Seed Venture Fund (TechCrunch and Entrackr, May 2023) — Amazon’s cheque came with a marketplace-distribution relationship rather than a board seat, unusual for its India retail bets
- Total raised: $71 million across six rounds as of May 2023, per Tracxn data cited by TechCrunch
- Valuation: not disclosed at any round found in public reporting; Hopscotch has never confirmed a headline valuation figure
How it makes money
- Original model (2012 onward): curated marketplace charging a 35% commission on third-party brand sales, keeping ₹35 of every ₹100 transacted and passing ₹65 to the seller, as per the Whizsky case study
- Current model: predominantly private-label design and manufacturing sold direct to consumer, which captures full retail margin instead of a commission slice, plus continued listings on Amazon, Flipkart and Myntra for reach
- Average order value: ₹1,500-1,600, as reported by DFU Publications in November 2025
- Channel split: 85-90% of revenue from Hopscotch’s own app and website, the remainder from marketplaces (DFU Publications, November 2025)
- Cost structure disclosed in filings: FY25 total expenses of ₹253.5 crore against revenue of ₹265.0 crore, leaving the ₹11.5 crore net profit, per Inc42 Datalabs
- What people get wrong: the company’s own “EBITDA-profitable” and “turns profitable” announcements in 2020 and January 2022 described operating profitability, not the bottom-line net profit that later filings showed was still a loss in FY22 — the two are easy to conflate but measure different things
The numbers
Figures below are revenue from operations and profit/loss after tax in ₹ crore, as reported in company filings cited by Entrackr and Inc42 Datalabs.
| Fiscal year | Revenue (₹ crore) | Profit / (loss) after tax (₹ crore) |
|---|---|---|
| FY22 (year to March 2022) | 235.7 | (17.75) |
| FY23 (year to March 2023) | 193.71 | Not disclosed in available filings |
| FY24 (year to March 2024) | 220.5 | 3.1 |
| FY25 (year to March 2025) | 265.0 | 11.5 |
- FY22 to FY25 revenue moved from ₹235.7 crore down to ₹193.71 crore and back up to ₹265.0 crore — a genuine dip in FY23, not a straight climb, per Entrackr and Inc42 Datalabs
- FY25 marks the first year net profit (₹11.5 crore) is both positive and larger than any single-year loss recorded since FY21, per Inc42 Datalabs
- FY25 net margin: about 4.3%, calculated from Inc42 Datalabs’ reported revenue and profit after tax
Where the money comes from
- Category: apparel accounted for 91% of Hopscotch’s revenue as of November 2025, with footwear, accessories and other categories making up the rest (DFU Publications, November 2025)
- Channel: 85-90% of revenue from Hopscotch’s own app and website; the remainder from Amazon, Flipkart and Myntra marketplace listings (DFU Publications, November 2025)
- Geography: 65% of demand comes from non-metro cities, and the company has said it reaches over 1,300 Indian cities, as per Indian Retailer’s interview with the company and DFU Publications’ November 2025 report
- The surprise: a brand built around fashion discovery gets most of its volume not from Mumbai or Delhi mothers browsing curated edits, but from smaller-town parents who have no comparable offline option at all — which is also why Hopscotch has said its near-term plan is to stay purely online rather than open stores, per DFU Publications, November 2025
The risks
- Fragmented, low-share competition: even India’s largest listed player in the category, FirstCry (Brainbees Solutions), which went public on the NSE and BSE in August 2024 raising about ₹4,193.73 crore, holds only a 2.5-3% share of India’s childcare products market by one RedSeer estimate cited in IPO coverage — implying no single kidswear retailer, Hopscotch included, has pricing power, and any one of dozens of players can undercut on price
- Assortment and inventory risk, self-disclosed: Hopscotch itself concluded that carrying roughly 40,000 live styles diluted per-style sales and margin, forcing a cut to 5,000-6,000 styles through 2026-27 — a correction that, if it goes too far, risks losing the “wide selection” pitch that drew customers in the first place (DFU Publications, November 2025)
- History of profit claims not matching filings: the company publicly announced profitability in 2020 and again in January 2022, yet FY22’s filed net loss of ₹17.75 crore was its widest in the years reviewed here — a track record that should make any future “profitable” announcement worth checking against the next set of filings (Entrackr, September 2020 and May 2023; Business Standard, January 2022)
The takeaway
Hopscotch’s most useful lesson is not about kidswear at all: it is that “profitable” is a word a company controls and a filed balance sheet is a word a regulator controls, and the two can say opposite things in the same year. A business can be telling the truth about its operating numbers while still losing money overall, and the only way to know which claim you are hearing is to ask which line of the accounts it is describing. Hopscotch’s own history — an EBITDA-profitable announcement in 2020, a “turns profitable” headline in January 2022, and a net loss that tripled in the fiscal year sitting between those two announcements — is as good a case study in reading that gap as any founder or investor is likely to find.
Frequently asked questions
Who founded Hopscotch and when?
Rahul Anand and Lisa Kennedy founded Hopscotch in October 2012 in Mumbai. Both had previously worked at Quidsi, the company behind Diapers.com, which Amazon acquired in 2010, as reported by YourStory in 2012 and TechCrunch in 2016.
Is Hopscotch profitable?
It reported a net profit of ₹11.5 crore in FY25 on revenue of ₹265.0 crore, according to Inc42 Datalabs, following a smaller ₹3.1 crore profit in FY24. Before that, Hopscotch recorded losses, including a ₹17.75 crore net loss in FY22 despite the company publicly claiming to have “turned profitable” in January 2022, as per Entrackr and Business Standard.
How much funding has Hopscotch raised and who are its investors?
Hopscotch had raised $71 million across six rounds by May 2023, according to Tracxn data cited by TechCrunch. Investors include Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin (via EE Capital), RPG Ventures, Amazon, Lionrock Capital, Rise Capital, IIFL Seed Venture Fund, Techpro Ventures and Velos Partners.
Is Hopscotch a listed company?
No. Hopscotch is privately held with no announced plans to list, as of September 2026. Its valuation has not been publicly disclosed at any funding round.
How does Hopscotch make money?
Hopscotch now earns mainly by designing and selling its own private-label kidswear directly to consumers through its app and website, which capture full retail margin, supplemented by listings on Amazon, Flipkart and Myntra. It began as a curated marketplace charging a 35% commission on other brands’ sales before shifting toward its own private label, according to a Whizsky case study of the business.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- TechCrunch, “Hopscotch, E-Commerce For Mums In India, Lands $13M Led By Facebook Co-Founder Saverin,” February 2016
- TechCrunch, “Amazon backs Indian kids fashion brand Hopscotch in $20M funding,” May 2023
- Entrackr, “Amazon leads $20 Mn round in kids’ fashion brand Hopscotch,” May 2023
- Entrackr, “Kids’ fashion brand Hopscotch raises $25 Mn fresh round after 4 years,” September 2020
- Inc42 Datalabs, “Hopscotch — An Ecommerce Funded Company Based Out Of Mumbai” (financials), accessed September 2026
- Whizsky, “Case Study: HopScotch Founder, Funding and Revenue Model,” accessed September 2026
- YourStory, “Hopscotch launches in India,” October 2012
- DFU Publications, “Hopscotch ditches ‘Flood the Market’ for ‘Fashion Focus’, targeting exponential online growth,” November 2025
- DFU Publications, “From Cribs to Catwalks: The meteoric rise of India’s kid’s wear market,” 2025
- Business Standard, “Hopscotch turns profitable, eyes Rs 1,000-crore yearly revenue,” January 2022
- MarketScreener, “Hopscotch Wholesale Trading Pvt Ltd… funding from Amazon.com, Inc., RPG Ventures, Lionrock Capital…,” May 2023
- Business Standard, “Firstcry IPO to open on August 6,” August 2024
- Indian Retailer, “How Kidswear Brand Hopscotch is Planning to Achieve 10x Growth in Next 5 Years,” 2021-22 interview
- Tracxn total-funding data, cited via TechCrunch, May 2023
- Trading Economics, USD/INR exchange rate, 18 September 2026
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