Startup Deep Dive : Increff — it landed Adidas and Puma on $17 million but still hasn’t turned a profit

Increff has raised only about $17 million in venture money since 2016 — a rounding error next to India’s better-known software unicorns — yet its inventory and merchandising software now runs inside warehouses for Adidas, Puma, Levi’s, Benetton and Reliance Retail, across more than 700 brands in over 35 countries. The company has still never closed a year in profit: in FY24 it booked revenue of about ₹92.68 crore ($9.7 million) and a net loss of ₹33.96 crore, a gap that had ballooned the year before, right after the company tried to go global.

That contradiction — blue-chip clients, thin funding, persistent losses — is the story of Increff. It is a Bengaluru-built, founder-bootstrapped-in-spirit SaaS company that solved a real problem for Indian fashion retail, got just enough capital from Sequoia, Premji Invest, TVS Capital and Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal’s 021 Capital to scale, overreached into the US and Europe, cut a fifth of its staff to correct course, and is now rebuilding around India and partner-led international growth.

Quick facts

What they do

Increff sells software to fashion, footwear, beauty and general-merchandise retailers that helps them decide what to stock, where to stock it, and how to move it once it is in a warehouse or store. Its two product lines work together: Assure is a warehouse and order management system that runs pick-pack-ship operations across online and offline channels, and Iris is an AI-driven merchandising layer that forecasts demand, plans assortments, allocates inventory between stores and channels, and recommends markdowns. The pitch to a brand like Puma or Levi’s is straightforward: fewer stockouts of the sizes and styles that sell, less unsold stock sitting in a warehouse, and a higher share of units that sell at full price rather than in an end-of-season clearance. Increff says it serves more than 700 brands in over 35 countries, with named customers including Adidas, Amazon, Puma, Levi’s, Benetton, Birkenstock and Reliance Retail.

The origin

The founding insight came out of Myntra, not out of a business-school case study. Rajul Jain had already tried and failed once — he co-founded the online fashion retailer Yebhi.com, which folded — before joining Myntra.com in April 2014 as senior vice-president of supply chain. Anshuman Agarwal, a two-decade veteran of e-commerce and retail operations, ran operations at the same company. Watching a fast-growing fashion e-tailer wrestle with the same problem every season — the wrong sizes and styles piling up in one warehouse while a different city ran out of stock — convinced the two that the fix was not more warehouses or more staff, but better software making the allocation and replenishment decisions. Rajul, Anshuman, Nirmal Jain and Romil Jain (Rajul’s brother) left Myntra in December 2016 and incorporated the company, initially as NextSCM Solutions, the same month construction of what would become Increff’s first product, Assure, began.

The struggle years

Increff’s setbacks are not hidden in an old filing — the company’s own CEO has described them on the record. The clearest one came in July 2023, when Increff cut close to 60 employees, roughly a fifth of its workforce, across tech, sales, customer success and HR. Rajul Jain told Inc42 the company had “touched profitability a couple of years back” but had since drifted from it, blaming adverse macroeconomic conditions, a shortfall in new client onboarding, some existing clients dropping out, and an unsuccessful, marketing-heavy push into the US and Europe that had not paid for itself.

The second, quieter setback has been founder attrition. Of the four people who started the company in 2016, two have since left the building. Romil Jain departed as co-founder and chief technology officer in late 2024, with Vishal Raj — a seven-year Increff veteran — stepping up to replace him as co-founder and CTO. Nirmal Jain has also since moved on, founding a separate direct-to-consumer apparel venture, OUTZIDR, which raised its own ₹30 crore round in 2025. Losing half of a four-person founding team inside a few years is the kind of thing that shows up in employee LinkedIn updates before it shows up in a press release, and it followed directly on from the 2023 cost-cutting.

The turning point

The hinge moment was the Series B round Increff closed in February 2022: $12 million led by TVS Capital Funds and Premji Invest, with Binny Bansal’s 021 Capital also participating, pushing the company’s reported valuation to about $73 million. Before that round, in FY22, Increff’s numbers looked like a company approaching breakeven — revenue had grown 27% to about ₹44.4 crore, and its net loss had shrunk to roughly ₹2.8 crore. The company used the fresh capital to do exactly what it told investors it would: open offices and hire teams in the United States and Europe. The numbers on the other side of that bet were rougher. By FY23, revenue had roughly doubled to somewhere between ₹85 crore (the CEO’s contemporaneous estimate) and ₹88.68 crore (the later filed figure), but the net loss had ballooned more than fifteen-fold to ₹48.04 crore. The international expansion had not generated enough new business to justify its cost, and five months into FY24 the company reversed course with the layoffs described above, telling investors it would shift from a direct sales model abroad to a partner-led one instead.

The money behind it

Increff has raised roughly $17 million in disclosed funding across three rounds since 2016 — a modest sum for a company competing for enterprise retail budgets against much better-capitalised rivals.

• Seed, 2016/17: $2 million from Sequoia Capital India (now Peak XV Partners) and a group of angel investors — the round that funded the build of the first version of Assure.
• Series A, April 2019: $3 million led by Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal’s 021 Capital, with Sequoia returning — used to expand the customer pipeline and take the first steps into international markets (Entrackr, April 2019; YourStory, April 2019).
• Series B, February 2022: $12 million led by TVS Capital Funds and Premji Invest (Azim Premji’s family office fund), with 021 Capital and existing angels also participating, reportedly valuing the company at about $73 million (Entrackr, February 2022; Forbes, February 2022).

Each investor changed something specific. Sequoia’s seed cheque bought the company enough runway to prove the warehouse-management product with early fashion e-commerce clients. Binny Bansal’s back-to-back participation in both the Series A and Series B gave Increff a well-known operator-investor whose Flipkart-era supply chain credibility helped it court large offline-first retailers like Reliance. TVS Capital and Premji Invest, both India-focused growth investors, brought the balance-sheet size for the Series B and pushed the company toward the international expansion that defined — and briefly destabilised — the following two years. No round since February 2022 has been publicly disclosed, and there is no confirmed Series C or IPO process as of September 2026.

How it makes money

Increff is a business-to-business SaaS company: retail brands and retailers pay recurring fees to run Increff’s software rather than build the equivalent in-house.

• Money in: subscription and platform fees from retail brands and retailers for its Assure (WMS/OMS) and Iris (merchandise planning) products, typically enterprise contracts with custom pricing rather than public self-serve tiers.
• Money out: the largest cost lines for an enterprise SaaS company at this stage are typically people (engineering, implementation and customer success) and sales and marketing — the same marketing-heavy international push that Increff’s CEO named as a driver of the FY23 loss spike.
• Where the margin sits: the company does not publish a gross margin, but its EBITDA margin improved from roughly -51.1% in FY23 to roughly -33.1% in FY24 as expenses fell 7.9% even while revenue grew, according to TheKredible’s analysis of its filings — meaning the business is narrowing its losses primarily by cutting cost, not yet by scaling revenue fast enough to outrun it.
• The part people get wrong: Increff is often bracketed with pure order-management or marketplace-shipping software such as Unicommerce, but its own positioning — and reviewers who cover both — describe Increff as built more for large-SKU fashion warehouse execution and merchandising intelligence, while Unicommerce leans toward marketplace order routing for a broader, smaller-seller base.

The numbers

Figures below are standalone financials as reported from regulatory filings by TheKredible and Entrackr; unit is ₹ crore unless stated.

*FY23 and FY24 revenue is shown as a range because Entrackr’s operating-revenue figure (₹85 crore FY23; ₹90 crore FY24) differs slightly from TheKredible’s total-revenue figure (₹88.68 crore FY23; ₹92.68 crore FY24), likely due to other income being included or excluded; both sourced to the company’s FY24 regulatory filings.

• FY22 revenue grew 27% year-on-year to ≈₹44.4 crore, with the net loss narrowing to ≈₹2.8 crore — the closest the company has come to breakeven on record (Inc42, August 2023).
• FY23 revenue roughly doubled year-on-year, but the net loss widened more than fifteen-fold to ₹48.04 crore, the year Increff funded its US and Europe push (Inc42; TheKredible).
• FY24 revenue grew a further 4.5–5.8% depending on source, while the net loss narrowed 29.3% to ₹33.96 crore as the company cut costs and headcount (TheKredible, December 2024; Entrackr, February 2025).
• Total expenses fell 7.9% in FY24 to ₹125.90 crore from ₹136.72 crore in FY23, even as revenue grew — the arithmetic behind the narrower loss (TheKredible).

Where the money comes from

Increff does not publish a country-wise or segment-wise revenue split in public filings, so the picture below is built from its disclosed customer base and its own account of where growth did and did not come from.

• Sector split: the customer base is concentrated in fashion, footwear and lifestyle retail (Puma, Adidas, Levi’s, Benetton), with a general-merchandise vertical serving broader retail categories, per the company’s own industry pages.
• Channel split: Increff serves both direct-to-consumer online sellers and large omnichannel retailers running both e-commerce and physical stores, with its warehouse-management product built specifically to handle high-SKU-count, size-and-colour-heavy fashion inventory.
• Geography: the company reports serving 700-plus brands across more than 35 countries, but its own admission that the FY22–23 push into the US and Europe underperformed suggests India, and to a lesser extent the Middle East, still carries most of the revenue (Entrackr, February 2025; company website).
• The surprise: despite an explicitly global positioning and a Series B raised partly to fund international offices, the company’s most consequential financial event of the past four years was a retreat from direct international selling back to a partner-led model — growth came from doing more with existing geography, not from the new ones.

The risks

• Persistent unprofitability: Increff has not reported a profitable year on record; even after cost cuts, FY24’s loss of ₹33.96 crore was more than a third the size of its revenue, meaning further funding or a sharper revenue inflection is needed to reach breakeven (TheKredible).
• Client concentration and cyclicality: the company’s own explanation for its FY23 stumble named “existing clients dropping out” and a shortfall in new client wins as direct causes of the loss spike, indicating real sensitivity to retail-sector demand cycles and a relatively small number of large accounts (Inc42, August 2023).
• Competitive crowding: Increff competes with Unicommerce — now a publicly listed company with a much larger claimed customer base of 7,500-plus sellers — and other regional players such as Ginesys in the same warehouse- and order-management category, which pressures both pricing and the pace of client acquisition (Ecommerce Paradise comparison, 2026).

The takeaway

Increff’s story is a reminder that a good product and a marquee client list are not the same as a good business. The company solved a real, specific problem for Indian fashion retail well enough to win Adidas, Puma and Reliance as customers on a shoestring $17 million of total funding — a sign the product genuinely works. But the moment it had a bit of capital and tried to become a global company on someone else’s timeline, its costs outran its revenue by a wide enough margin to force a fifth of the workforce out the door. The lesson that survives the specifics of retail SaaS: expansion funded by a single round, rather than by a business that has already proven it earns its keep in one market, is a bet against your own balance sheet — and the correction, when it comes, tends to be measured in people, not just in percentage points.

Frequently asked questions

What does Increff actually sell?

Warehouse and order management software (Assure) and AI-led merchandise planning software (Iris) to fashion, footwear and general-merchandise retailers, helping them manage inventory across online and offline channels.

Who founded Increff and when?

Rajul Jain, Anshuman Agarwal, Nirmal Jain and Romil Jain, all former Myntra executives, founded the company in August 2016 in Bengaluru; two of the four have since left, and Vishal Raj has been elevated to co-founder and CTO.

How much funding has Increff raised, and who are its investors?

Roughly $17 million across a 2016/17 seed round from Sequoia Capital India, a 2019 Series A from Binny Bansal’s 021 Capital, and a 2022 Series B led by TVS Capital Funds and Premji Invest, which reportedly valued the company at about $73 million.

Is Increff profitable?

No. It reported a net loss of ₹33.96 crore on revenue of about ₹92.68 crore in FY24, though the loss has narrowed from a peak of ₹48.04 crore in FY23, according to filings reported by TheKredible.

Why did Increff lay off staff in 2023?

The company cut close to 60 employees, about a fifth of its workforce, after an aggressive, marketing-heavy expansion into the US and Europe failed to generate enough new business to justify its cost, per its CEO’s own account to Inc42.

Sources

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

• Entrackr, “Sequoia-backed Increff scoops up $12 Mn in Series B” — February 2022
• Entrackr, “Binny Bansal, 021 Capital lead $3 Mn round in Sequoia-backed Increff” — April 2019
• Forbes, “Sequoia-Backed Indian SaaS Startup Increff Raises $12 Million” — February 2022
• Inc42, “Exclusive: Premji Invest-Backed Increff Lays Off 20% Workforce To Cut Costs” — August 2023
• TheKredible, “Increff Narrows Losses by 29.3% in FY24 as Revenue Grows 4.5% to Rs 92.68 Crore” — December 2024
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: Increff co-founder Romil Jain quits” — February 2025
• Inc42, “Increff Founder’s D2C Apparel Venture OUTZIDR Bags INR 30 Cr” — April 2025
• YourStory, “[Funding alert] Binny Bansal invests in supply chain management startup INCREFF” — April 2019
• Ecommerce Paradise, “Increff vs Unicommerce in 2026” — 2026
• Increff company website, About Us and Customers pages — accessed September 2026
• Trading Economics, USD/INR exchange rate — 18 September 2026

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