Startup Deep Dive : Kama Ayurveda — Puig owns 85% of it, and it’s still losing money

In FY25, Kama Ayurveda took in ₹141 crore ($14.7 million) in revenue and still lost money — a swing back to loss just three years after a global beauty major paid to control it. The contradiction sits at the centre of this deep dive: Puig, the Spanish owner of Rabanne and Carolina Herrera, holds 85 percent of India’s most recognisable Ayurvedic beauty brand, yet Kama’s FY25 filings show revenue down roughly 16 percent year-on-year, EBITDA collapsing and borrowings up sharply.

Twenty-three years after Vivek Sahni launched a handful of skincare products sourced out of Coimbatore, Kama Ayurveda has hotel-brand credibility, a Puig balance sheet behind it, and a single store in London. What it does not yet have, on the evidence of its own regulatory filings, is a repeatable path to profit at scale — and that gap, more than the Puig deal itself, is the real story.

Quick facts

What they do

Kama Ayurveda makes and sells Ayurvedic skincare, haircare, body-care and wellness products — oils, creams, hair treatments and bath essentials formulated around classical Ayurvedic texts rather than modern cosmetic chemistry. Its customer is the urban Indian buyer trading up from mass-market natural brands, plus a smaller international audience of Ayurveda-curious shoppers in the UK and, through hotel and spa placements, the US and Europe. The brand sits at the premium end of Indian beauty, priced above mass Ayurveda players like Patanjali and Himalaya, and it competes most directly with Forest Essentials for the same shelf and the same customer.

The origin

Vivek Sahni did not start out in beauty. After an economics degree from Delhi University and a design qualification from Parsons School of Design in New York, he ran a communications and product design studio, Vivek Sahni Design, from 1993. The idea for Kama came sideways: in 1998 the government hired his studio to help revive the Khadi brand. Working on Khadi’s natural fibres and traditional processes exposed Sahni to India’s older manufacturing knowledge, and to Ayurveda specifically, in a way his design career never had.

He spent time in Kerala with an Ayurvedic practitioner studying formulations drawn from Vedic texts, then launched Kama Ayurveda in 2002 with business partners Dave Chang, Rajshree Pathy and Vikram Goyal, sourcing and manufacturing early products out of Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu. Sahni’s own framing of the bet, given to Forbes India in 2017, is unusually specific for a founder story: he wanted “to start something that was Indian, a recognised science and that worked” — not a wellness aesthetic borrowed from elsewhere, but a business built on a documented tradition. The first sign that the bet was working came in 2005, when five-star Delhi hotels including The Oberoi and The Park began buying Kama’s amenities and spa products, giving the young brand institutional credibility years before it had a single retail store.

The struggle years

The hotel contracts were validation, not scale. For close to a decade after 2002, Kama Ayurveda stayed small: its first-ever retail store did not open until 2012, in Delhi’s Khan Market, and even after that it remained a two-to-three-store business. When the private equity firm Lighthouse Advisors first looked at the company around 2014, Kama was turning over roughly ₹10-12 crore a year — a product the investors liked, attached to a business that had not been built to grow. Lighthouse’s own account of the period describes convincing the founders to take institutional capital at all, because the operation was still run like the small design-led venture it had started as.

The second setback was sharper and better documented. In the fiscal year ended March 2021, as the COVID-19 pandemic shut malls, hotels and standalone stores for months at a stretch, Kama Ayurveda’s revenue fell to ₹96 crore and the company posted a net loss of ₹24 crore, according to regulatory filings reported by Inc42. For a brand whose distribution leaned on physical retail and hotel and spa wholesale — the same channels that built its early credibility — a pandemic that closed both was close to an existential threat.

The third disruption was to the cap table rather than the balance sheet. When Puig increased its holding from 49 percent to 85 percent in September 2022, Lighthouse and Kama’s other minority investors exited entirely. A decade after rescuing an undercapitalised, two-store business, the growth investor’s involvement ended the moment a strategic buyer was ready to take full control — a reminder that even a successful financial turnaround does not guarantee an investor stays for the next chapter.

The turning point

If one event separates the Kama Ayurveda that struggled for a decade from the Kama Ayurveda that eventually interested a European beauty conglomerate, it is Lighthouse Advisors’ investment beginning in 2014. Before the cheque, the numbers were unambiguous: two to three stores, roughly ₹10-12 crore in annual turnover, and a brand better known to five-star hotel buyers than to retail customers. After Lighthouse committed capital — deployed in tranches through 2017, reported at around $10 million in total — Kama expanded to about 30 stores, growing at close to 70 percent compound annual growth over five years, by Lighthouse’s own account of the investment. That expansion is what put Kama on Puig’s radar: the Spanish group made its first move in March 2019, when the company had grown to 52 retail outlets. Without the 2014 recapitalisation, there is no evidence Kama would have reached a scale a foreign strategic buyer wanted to own.

The money behind it

Kama Ayurveda’s funding history is short and concentrated in two backers, not the long multi-round sequence typical of a venture-backed startup.

• Lighthouse Advisors — first investment around March 2014, with roughly $10 million deployed in tranches through 2017; changed the business from an undercapitalised two-store operation into a roughly 30-store retail chain, and exited fully in September 2022 when Puig took majority control.
• Puig — invested ₹100 crore (about $14.4 million at the time) for a minority stake on 12 March 2019, when Kama had 52 stores; increased its holding from 49 percent to 85 percent on 14 September 2022 for undisclosed terms, buying out Lighthouse and other minority holders in the process.

Total disclosed funding across the two backers comes to roughly $24-25 million, per aggregated deal-tracking data from Crunchbase and PitchBook — a modest sum next to the valuations common in venture-funded Indian D2C brands, reflecting that Kama was profitable in patches and never ran a cash-burn growth model. Kama’s own valuation has never been disclosed at either the 2019 or 2022 transaction; Puig’s parent company, by contrast, is public: it listed on the Barcelona, Madrid, Bilbao and Valencia exchanges on 3 May 2024 at €24.50 a share, valuing the group at close to €14 billion, in the largest European IPO of that year.

How it makes money

Kama Ayurveda’s business model has stayed consistent since 2002 even as ownership changed: sell premium-priced Ayurvedic personal-care products through channels that protect either margin or credibility, and use hotel and spa placements as a marketing and distribution channel rather than a scale business in its own right.

• Money in — full-price sales through Kama’s own standalone stores and D2C website carry the best margin; shop-in-shop counters inside chains such as Shoppers Stop share revenue with the host retailer; hotel and spa wholesale is lower-margin per unit but has effectively zero customer-acquisition cost, a legacy of the 2005 Oberoi and Park Hotels deals.
• Costs out — formulation and manufacturing run through a long-standing partnership with the Coimbatore-based Arya Vaidya Pharmacy rather than in-house factories; the largest recurring cost is the physical retail footprint itself — rent and staffing across dozens of exclusive stores and shop-in-shop counters, plus the added compliance and reporting cost of being a Puig subsidiary since 2022.
• Where the margin sits — historically in owned retail and hotel wholesale, both channels the founders built before taking outside capital; FY25’s collapse in EBITDA suggests that formula strained once store count grew faster than same-store sales.
• What people get wrong — that Puig’s ownership by itself fixes unit economics. Three years into majority Puig control, Kama’s FY25 filings show revenue falling and margins negative, which suggests the acquisition has so far bought Kama distribution reach and brand credibility rather than profitability.

The numbers

Kama Ayurveda does not publish results the way a listed company does, and its FY23 and FY24 numbers were not available in public filing trackers at the time of writing. The three fiscal years below are the ones with verifiable figures.

• FY21 revenue and loss figures are drawn from regulatory filings reported by Inc42 in September 2022, covering the pandemic-hit year before Puig’s majority buy-in.
• FY22 revenue and profit figures come from a business-press review of Ayurvedic skincare brand financials published in August 2023, citing regulatory filings.
• FY25 revenue, growth rate and margin come from financial trackers Tracxn and Tofler, both citing the company’s latest available filings, accessed September 2026.
• For comparison, closest rival Forest Essentials posted ₹585 crore in FY25, up 18 percent year-on-year, as reported by The Morning Context in November 2025 — a gap of roughly four times Kama’s revenue that has widened rather than closed since Puig took majority control.

Where the money comes from

Kama Ayurveda’s revenue runs through five channels, and the split reveals a business still overwhelmingly rooted in India despite a foreign owner and an international store.

• Own exclusive stores — the largest and highest-margin channel; the network stood at 52 stores when Puig first invested in March 2019 and had grown to 54 stores, with plans to reach 60 by the end of that year, at the time of Puig’s 2022 majority buy-in.
• Shop-in-shop counters — around 70 counters inside large-format retailers such as Shoppers Stop, as reported alongside the September 2022 Puig transaction.
• Hotel and spa wholesale — the original channel from 2005, still supplying luxury hotels and spas in India and, on a smaller scale, the US and Europe; low customer-acquisition cost but not disclosed separately in filings.
• E-commerce and marketplaces — Kama’s own D2C site plus listings on Indian marketplaces including Nykaa, Myntra and Tira, alongside Amazon.
• International retail — a single standalone store in London’s Westbourne Grove, opened in November 2023, plus a Harrods counter added the same year; company-tracking data on Kama’s own e-commerce domain puts India as effectively the entire recorded revenue base as of 2025.

The surprise is not that India dominates — most Indian D2C brands are India-heavy — but how little the Puig relationship has changed that mix. Three years after acquiring majority control of an Ayurvedic beauty brand specifically to build an international wellness platform, Puig’s flagship proof point abroad is one 750-square-foot store in London.

The risks

• Deteriorating unit economics under new ownership — Kama’s FY25 filings, per Tofler, show revenue down roughly 16 percent year-on-year, EBITDA down roughly 157 percent and borrowings up roughly 458 percent, alongside a swing to a net loss. That combination — falling sales, collapsing operating profit and rising debt in the same year — suggests the company borrowed to sustain its store network and UK entry through a sales slowdown, a materially different picture from FY22’s profit-tracking-growth year.
• Widening competitive gap — Forest Essentials, Kama’s closest positioning rival, posted ₹585 crore in FY25 against Kama’s ₹141 crore, growing 18 percent while Kama shrank, per The Morning Context’s November 2025 reporting. Forest Essentials itself is now the subject of a full buyout by the Estée Lauder Companies, announced 5 March 2026, on top of the 49 percent stake Estée Lauder already held since 2020 — meaning both of India’s leading heritage Ayurveda brands are now foreign-major-owned, and Kama is the smaller of the two by a wide margin.
• Governance and key-person dependence — control passed to Puig in September 2022 when Lighthouse and other minority investors exited; Vivek Sahni remains chairman and CEO, and the brand’s “authentically Indian” positioning is still built around his story, but strategic and capital decisions now sit with a listed Spanish parent. No public succession plan has been disclosed for the founder’s role.

The takeaway

The lesson in Kama Ayurveda is not about Ayurveda, or even about beauty retail — it is about sequencing. Capital and brand credibility arrived in the right order once: a decade of hotel-grade product credibility earned Lighthouse’s trust in 2014, and disciplined growth on that capital earned Puig’s trust in 2019. But scale and financial discipline did not arrive in the right order the second time. Between 2022 and 2025, Kama expanded its ownership structure, its international footprint and its store ambitions under a much larger parent, and its FY25 filings show margins and revenue both moving the wrong way at once. A well-known heritage story and a listed conglomerate’s balance sheet can buy distribution and patience. They cannot, on their own, buy the operating discipline that made the brand worth buying in the first place — that has to be rebuilt on the ground, store by store, the same way it was the first time.

Frequently asked questions

Who owns Kama Ayurveda now?

Spanish beauty and fashion group Puig owns 85 percent of Kama Ayurveda, after increasing its stake from 49 percent on 14 September 2022, when earlier investors including Lighthouse Advisors exited. Founder Vivek Sahni remains chairman and CEO.

How much money has Kama Ayurveda raised?

Kama Ayurveda raised roughly $24-25 million in total across two institutional backers: Lighthouse Advisors, which invested around $10 million in tranches through 2017, and Puig, which invested ₹100 crore (about $14.4 million) for a minority stake in March 2019 before buying majority control in 2022.

Is Kama Ayurveda profitable?

It has swung between profit and loss. The company posted a ₹24 crore loss in FY21 during the pandemic, a ₹2.3 crore profit in FY22, and a net loss again in FY25 with revenue down about 16 percent year-on-year, according to regulatory filings cited by Inc42, business-press reporting and financial trackers Tracxn and Tofler.

How does Kama Ayurveda compare to Forest Essentials?

Forest Essentials is roughly four times larger by revenue: ₹585 crore in FY25 against Kama’s ₹141 crore, and growing 18 percent while Kama’s revenue fell, as reported by The Morning Context in November 2025. Forest Essentials is also now moving toward full ownership by the Estée Lauder Companies.

Where does Kama Ayurveda sell outside India?

Kama Ayurveda opened its first store outside India in London’s Westbourne Grove in November 2023 and added a counter at Harrods the same year. Beyond that, its international presence is largely hotel and spa wholesale placements and limited e-commerce; India accounts for effectively all of its recorded revenue as of the most recent company-tracking data.

Sources

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

• Forbes India, “The idea was to start something that was Indian: Kama Ayurveda co-founder”, May 2017
• Forbes India, “How Vivek Sahni is taking Kama Ayurveda local and global at the same time”, July 2023
• YourStory, “Tying up with a 100-year-old pharmacy, Kama Ayurveda clocks a revenue of Rs 110 Cr”, September 2020
• Inc42, “Spanish Brand Puig Acquires Majority Stake In D2C Startup Kama Ayurveda”, September 2022
• Puig Newsroom, “Puig acquires a majority stake in Kama Ayurveda and consolidates its presence in India”, September 2022
• Lighthouse Funds (lhfunds.com), “Spain’s Puig makes India entry with investment in PE-backed Kama Ayurveda”, March 2019
• Lighthouse Funds, Kama Ayurveda portfolio page, accessed September 2026
• CosmeticsBusiness, “Kama Ayurveda to open first UK store in November as part of expansion plans”, September 2023
• Indian Retailer, “How Kama Ayurveda is Offering a Seamless Omnichannel Experience”, 2021
• Business-press review of Ayurvedic skincare brand financials citing regulatory filings, August 2023
• Tracxn, “Kama Ayurveda — Company Profile, Funding and Financials”, accessed September 2026
• Tofler, “Kama Ayurveda Private Limited — Financials”, accessed September 2026
• ECDB.com, Kama Ayurveda retailer revenue and market data, accessed September 2026
• The Morning Context, “Kama Ayurveda’s patient growth has not reaped the crop it hoped for”, November 2025
• Bloomberg, “Rabanne Owner Puig Rises in Spanish Debut After $2.6 Billion IPO”, May 2024
• Business Standard, “US beauty major Estee Lauder to acquire Ayurveda brand Forest Essentials”, March 2026
• The Estée Lauder Companies, newsroom release on the Forest Essentials transaction, March 2026

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