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Startup Deep Dive : Kapiva — Rs 342 crore in sales, Rs 69 crore in losses, and a 0 million vote of confidence

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

In FY25, Kapiva made Rs 342 crore selling ayurvedic juices, gummies and supplements to Indians who no longer trust a vaidya’s shop but still want the tag “ayurveda” on the label — and it lost Rs 69 crore doing it, its widest loss yet.

Weeks after that loss became public, Kapiva’s oldest institutional backer walked away with a full exit, and a fresh set of investors wrote in over $60 million (₹576 crore at ₹96 ≈ $1, as of 18 September 2026) to keep funding the same model, at a company whose founder now talks openly about an IPO in two to three years. That contradiction — rising revenue, rising losses, and rising institutional conviction, all at once — is the story of how a hundred-year-old ayurveda pedigree got rebuilt as a modern D2C nutrition brand.

Quick facts

Company Kapiva (legal entity: Adret Retail Private Limited)
Founded Entity incorporated 2015; Kapiva brand launched January 2016
Founder(s) Ameve Sharma and Shrey Badhani
Businesses Ayurvedic nutrition and wellness D2C — juices, supplements, gummies, teas, ghee and skincare across 100-plus SKUs
Latest FY revenue Rs 342 crore (FY25, up 50% year-on-year)
Latest FY profit/loss Net loss of Rs 69 crore (FY25, up 23% from FY24)
Listed Private; founder has stated an IPO target of 2-3 years, as of September 2025
Market value / last valuation Not publicly disclosed after the September 2025 round; total funding raised to date reported between roughly $90 million (Entrackr) and $120 million (Inc42)
Key shareholders / CEO Ameve Sharma (co-founder and CEO); investors include 360 ONE Asset, Vertex Growth, Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India, 3one4 Capital and OrbiMed Asia; Fireside Ventures fully exited in September 2025

What they do

Kapiva sells ayurvedic nutrition and wellness products — herbal juices, capsules, gummies, powders, teas, A2 ghee, cold-pressed oils and skincare — across more than 100 SKUs aimed at condition-specific use cases such as diabetes care, heart health, liver support, hormonal balance, weight management and gym or sports nutrition. The buyer is mostly an urban Indian consumer who wants an ayurvedic alternative sold with FMCG-style packaging, clinical language and same-day delivery rather than a visit to a vaidya or a traditional pharmacy; a smaller international business serves the Indian diaspora and wellness shoppers in the UK, the US and the UAE.

The origin

Ameve Sharma is a third-generation member of the family behind Baidyanath, the ayurvedic medicine group his ancestors founded in 1917 and grew into one of India’s largest ayurvedic manufacturers. He studied economics at New York University, did an MBA at INSEAD, and consulted at McKinsey & Company before concluding that a century-old family firm could not move at the speed a new brand needed. His insight was simple: India trusted ayurveda culturally far more than it trusted ayurveda commercially — the category lacked the scientific validation, modern branding and organised retail that had let mainstream FMCG brands win shelf space and repeat purchase. He partnered with Shrey Badhani, who had worked at Bain & Company and then in private equity at Bain Capital, and the two built Kapiva on that gap: modern packaging and clinical language layered onto ayurvedic formulations, sold the way a contemporary consumer brand would be sold rather than the way a medicine cabinet would be stocked. The entity behind Kapiva, Adret Retail Private Limited, was incorporated in 2015, and the Kapiva brand itself launched in January 2016, backed initially by about Rs 4.4 crore in angel funding raised in 2017.

The struggle years

Kapiva did not start as the D2C nutrition brand it is today. It began as a small chain of ayurvedic clinics — four of them — built on the belief that personalised, vaidya-led treatment was the most credible way to make ayurveda relevant again. The clinics were not a failure by their own narrow measure: they reportedly generated about Rs 3 crore a month within their first 18 months. But the model was high-touch and low-scale, and it could not answer the much bigger opportunity the founders had originally set out to chase. By the end of 2017 and into 2018, Kapiva shut the clinics entirely, cut its catalogue from roughly 200 products down to about 40, redesigned its packaging, and rebuilt its team to sell through modern trade and online marketplaces instead. This was, in effect, a second founding less than two years after the first one — done on the back of only Rs 4.4 crore in angel capital until Fireside Ventures wrote Kapiva’s first institutional cheque of $2.5 million on 25 January 2019. By that point the brand had scaled to roughly 4,000 retail outlets across ten Indian cities, but it was still a company proving a completely different business model from the one it was originally funded to run.

The turning point

By FY22, four years after the pivot to FMCG, Kapiva had grown its offline and online distribution but remained a modest business: Rs 59.1 crore in revenue against a net loss of Rs 48.1 crore. The turning point was less a single dramatic event than a capital-and-credibility shift that began in October 2022, when OrbiMed Asia — a global healthcare-focused investor — anchored the first tranche of Kapiva’s Series C round. OrbiMed’s involvement pushed Kapiva to invest in things a consumer-brand investor typically would not prioritise: clinical trials, DNA fingerprinting of raw herbal material, and a larger in-house research and development team. The numbers on either side of that shift are stark. In FY22, before the OrbiMed capital and the clinical-validation push took hold, revenue was Rs 59.1 crore. In FY23, the first full year after it, revenue nearly doubled to Rs 114.5 crore, up 93.7% year-on-year. The turnaround was not clean, though — losses grew alongside revenue, rising 34.1% to Rs 64.5 crore in FY23 from Rs 48.1 crore in FY22, which is the pattern that has defined Kapiva’s growth ever since: real revenue scale bought with real, and growing, cash burn.

The money behind it

How it makes money

The numbers

Kapiva’s revenue has grown every year since FY22, but so, in three of the last four years, has its loss. Figures are drawn from regulatory filings as reported by Entrackr and Inc42 (unit: Rs crore).

Fiscal year Revenue (Rs crore) Net loss (Rs crore)
FY22 59.1 48.1
FY23 114.5 64.5
FY24 228 56
FY25 342 69

Where the money comes from

The risks

The takeaway

Kapiva’s founders started with what looked like an unbeatable inherited advantage: a hundred-year-old family name in ayurveda, and a founder who grew up inside the category. It counted for almost nothing in the market they actually had to win. They still had to shut down their original clinics, cut their product catalogue by 80%, rebuild their team from scratch, and then spend nearly half of every rupee of operating expense on advertising just to get a new, younger, more skeptical customer to believe an ayurvedic supplement could work as well as a modern one. A decade later, that same company is re-entering clinical care through new adherence-led Ayurveda clinics — a sign that the credibility Kapiva spent nine years and roughly $90-120 million building through modern packaging and marketing is now, finally, sturdy enough to be spent on the higher-touch model it originally walked away from. Inherited trust does not transfer automatically into a new channel or a new generation of buyers; it has to be re-earned, in whatever format that generation actually shops in.

Frequently asked questions

What does Kapiva sell?

Ayurvedic nutrition and wellness products — herbal juices, capsules, gummies, powders, teas, ghee, oils and skincare — across more than 100 SKUs, targeted mainly at condition-specific use cases such as diabetes care, heart health and sports nutrition, sold online and through more than 40,000 retail stores.

Who founded Kapiva and when?

Ameve Sharma and Shrey Badhani. The legal entity, Adret Retail Private Limited, was incorporated in 2015, and the Kapiva brand launched in January 2016, originally as a chain of ayurvedic clinics before pivoting to an FMCG model by 2018.

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

Kapiva has raised money across an angel round (2017), a Fireside Ventures-led first institutional round (January 2019), a Vertex Ventures-led Series B (2021, reported), an OrbiMed Asia-led Series C in tranches (2022-2024), and a Series D of over $60 million co-led by 360 ONE Asset and Vertex Growth in September 2025. Total funding raised is reported at roughly $90-120 million depending on the source and whether secondary transactions are included.

Is Kapiva profitable?

No. Kapiva posted a net loss of Rs 69 crore in FY25 on revenue of Rs 342 crore, its widest loss to date, though the company has stated an internal target of narrowing losses to single-digit crore figures in FY26 alongside Rs 600 crore in revenue.

Is Kapiva planning an IPO?

Founder Ameve Sharma described the September 2025 Series D as a “pre-IPO” fundraise and has stated a target of listing within two to three years, though no formal IPO filing has been made as of this article.

Sources

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

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