In September 2022, Nykaa paid an undisclosed sum, in an all-cash deal, for a Delhi content startup that had not closed a fresh equity round in three years and had just booked its fourth straight year of operating losses. Two years on, regulatory filings for that same business — now folded into Nykaa Fashion Ltd and still known to its users as LBB — show something that never once appears in its nine-year filing history before the deal: a profit. Little Black Book (LBB) reported a profit after tax of ₹5.2 crore (roughly $0.54 million) on revenue of ₹31.1 crore (about $3.2 million) in FY24, according to Inc42’s reading of its financial filings.
That single line — first profit, seven years after its first funding round, two years after a rescue acquisition — is the spine of this piece. LBB started as a Tumblr blog cataloguing restaurants and events in Delhi, became a venture-funded “discovery” app, tried and struggled to turn that audience into a commerce business, ran out of runway during the pandemic, and was bought out by Nykaa before it could raise again. What happened after the sale — and the numbers on both sides of it — is the part most coverage of the deal never followed up on.
Quick facts
| Company | LBB (Little Black Book); legal entity Iluminar Media Limited |
| Founded | 2011, as a Tumblr blog by Suchita Salwan; incorporated with a co-founder in 2015 |
| Founder(s) | Suchita Salwan (2011) and Dhruv Mathur (co-founder from 2015) |
| Businesses | Content and local-discovery platform (LBB) plus a curated seller marketplace (LBB Shop) |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹31.1 crore, FY24, up 85.2% year on year (Inc42, citing financial filings) |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Profit after tax of ₹5.2 crore, FY24 — the first profitable year on record (Inc42) |
| Listed | Private. Wholly owned subsidiary of Nykaa Fashion Ltd since 10 September 2022; legally merged into Nykaa Fashion Ltd with effect from 1 April 2024, NCLT approval 27 May 2025 |
| Market value / last valuation | Acquisition value undisclosed (September 2022); pre-acquisition equity raised totalled about $8.3 million across five rounds (Inc42, Tracxn) |
| Key shareholders / leadership | 100% owned by Nykaa Fashion Ltd (part of listed FSN E-Commerce Ventures Ltd); founder Suchita Salwan left to join Bharti Airtel as chief customer officer by December 2025 |
What they do
LBB sells recommendations, and then it sells the things it recommends. The app and website run city-wise, editorially curated lists of restaurants, cafes, salons, events, home decor and fashion labels, aimed at urban, English-speaking millennials in India’s metros. On top of that content layer sits LBB Shop, a marketplace where the same small and mid-sized brands LBB writes about can list and sell products directly to that audience. The pitch to a local business is simple: get discovered through a trusted list, then get bought through the same platform, without having to build either an audience or a storefront of its own. The pitch to the brand behind LBB — first Iluminar Media, now Nykaa Fashion Ltd — is that content converts better than a plain listings page, because readers already trust the recommendation before they see the product.
The origin
Suchita Salwan was working in digital marketing at BBC Entertainment India when she started keeping a Tumblr blog in 2011, photographing and writing up restaurants, cafes and events around Delhi. The insight was not really about technology. It was about a complaint: she was tired of hearing Delhi called a boring city by people who, in her view, simply had not been shown the right places. The blog was free to run — no content costs beyond her own time and a small circle of photographers and contributors — and she funded her first workspace with a personal outlay of about ₹70,000. For four years it stayed a side project alongside her day job.
The turn from blog to business came in 2015, when Dhruv Mathur, a Carnegie Mellon graduate, joined as co-founder. That same year the pair raised roughly ₹1 crore from angel investors, including former Google India head Rajan Anandan, the Singapore Angel Network and art-gallery investor Aseem Vadehra. The money paid for the thing a blog cannot buy on its own: a team, a proper app, and cities beyond Delhi. By 2017, LBB’s user base had gone from around 100,000 to 1.5 million, and the platform had expanded into Bengaluru, Mumbai, Chennai, Pune and Kolkata, opening itself up to user-generated recommendations rather than relying only on staff writers.
The struggle years
The strain showed up early, in the unglamorous way it usually does: costs outrunning revenue even as the top line grew. In FY18, LBB’s revenue doubled year on year to ₹6.62 crore from ₹3.24 crore in FY17 — a good headline — but its losses still climbed 27% to ₹4.74 crore, because total expenses had grown 65% to ₹11.45 crore, with staff costs as the largest single line. Scaling an editorial team across cities is not cheap, and LBB was still years away from meaningful commerce revenue to offset it.
The bigger blow landed with the pandemic. LBB’s core business — restaurants, salons, events, local retail — was also the part of the Indian economy that shut down hardest during 2020 and 2021. Operating revenue fell 41% to ₹8.63 crore in FY21 from ₹14.62 crore in FY20, as merchant collections dried up along with footfall. LBB did cut its losses by 46% in the same year, to ₹12.76 crore from ₹23.66 crore, largely by cutting expenses 45% to ₹21.89 crore — but a shrinking loss on a shrinking business is still a business running out of options. According to Nykaa’s own deal announcement, LBB’s revenue for that year was recorded at ₹19.44 crore, a figure that does not reconcile with the ₹8.63 crore operating-revenue number in its regulatory filings reported by Entrackr; the gap is most likely the difference between narrow operating revenue and a broader, company-reported collections figure, but neither side has explained it publicly, so both numbers are recorded here rather than picked between.
By early 2022, according to reporting by The Ken based on conversations with former employees, the strain was visible inside the company even if it looked sudden from outside. LBB halted onboarding new brands to LBB Shop in February 2022, and by April 2022 had redirected staff to focus on fashion content alone, pulling back from the broader commerce ambitions it had been building since 2018. The company had not closed a new equity round since April 2019, and pandemic-hit merchant collections meant it had, in the words of people who worked there at the time, been burning far more than it was earning for a long stretch with no fresh capital in sight.
The turning point
The turning point was not a product launch or a viral moment. It was a sale. Nykaa’s board approved the acquisition of Iluminar Media, LBB’s parent, on 5 August 2022, and the deal — a 100% acquisition, all-cash, for an undisclosed sum — closed on 10 September 2022. On one side of that transaction sat a company that, on its own numbers, was three years without new funding, had shed 41% of its revenue in a single pandemic year, and had just told staff to abandon most of its commerce roadmap. On the other side sat Nykaa, fresh off its November 2021 listing, buying a platform it said reached over 70 million users across its channels and gave it “strong synergies” in content-led brand discovery. Two years later, the numbers moved: by FY24, the renamed and re-owned business posted revenue of ₹31.1 crore, up 85.2% on FY23’s ₹16.8 crore, and turned its first profit — ₹5.2 crore after tax, with an estimated EBITDA of ₹6.5 crore. The acquisition that looked, at the time, like an admission of defeat is the reason the business exists today, and the reason it eventually made money.
The money behind it
- 2015, seed: about $150,000 led by Chiratae Ventures (then IDG Ventures), alongside roughly ₹1 crore from angels including Rajan Anandan, Singapore Angel Network and Aseem Vadehra (Inc42, Forbes India)
- May 2016: $1.2 million led by Indian Angel Network, with IDG Ventures participating (Inc42)
- October 2017: about $1.0 million led by Blume Ventures, with existing investors IDG Ventures and Indian Angel Network (Inc42)
- April 2019, Series A: $5 million led by Inventus Capital India and IAN Fund, with Blume Ventures and Chiratae Ventures participating as existing investors — the round that funded LBB’s push into commerce and 100,000-plus merchants (Inc42, YourStory, Business Standard)
- August 2019, venture debt: about $972,000 from Alteria Capital (Inc42)
- Total raised before acquisition: about $8.3 million (~₹66 crore at the time of the rounds) across five disclosed rounds, per Inc42 and Tracxn — a modest sum by Indian consumer-internet standards, and one reason a fresh round became hard to close after 2019
- What each backer changed: the 2015 angel round funded the shift from blog to app and multi-city expansion; the 2019 Series A funded the pivot into merchant commerce (LBB Shop) and a jump to over 100,000 listed merchants; the venture debt round bridged working capital rather than funding growth
- Acquisition, September 2022: Nykaa (FSN E-Commerce Ventures Ltd, through subsidiary Nykaa Fashion) bought 100% of Iluminar Media in an all-cash deal; the price was not disclosed by either company (Entrackr, Inc42, BusinessToday)
How it makes money
- Advertising is the base layer. Founder Suchita Salwan described the model directly: “Our revenue model is based on ads. How that works is similar to tech media enterprises like Facebook, Google, Instagram” (Inc42 interview). Clients ranged from small yoga studios to large brands such as Amazon.
- Commerce sits on top. LBB Shop earns through commission or platform fees charged to the brands and merchants it lists — described in its FY21 filings as “sale of service,” which is majority commission or platform fee income (Entrackr). The exact take rate has not been publicly disclosed.
- The revenue split, last independently disclosed (FY21): sale of service (commission/platform fees) made up 92% of total collections; the e-commerce business itself contributed the remaining 8% (Entrackr, November 2021) — meaning even at the height of its “commerce” pivot, LBB was still overwhelmingly a media and referral business, not a marketplace, by revenue.
- Cost structure is people-heavy. In FY21, employee benefit costs were ₹14.4 crore, or 66% of total expenses of ₹21.89 crore — the cost of running city-wise editorial and sales teams rather than a purely automated platform (Entrackr).
- Unit economics before the turnaround were poor. In FY21, LBB spent ₹2.54 to earn every ₹1 of operating revenue (Entrackr) — a ratio that had to close for the business to ever be self-sustaining, and one that only closed after it stopped being an independent company.
- The part people get wrong: LBB is commonly described as an e-commerce or social-commerce startup because of LBB Shop, but its own filings show advertising and platform-fee income, not product sales, has always driven the bulk of its revenue.
The numbers
| Fiscal year (₹ crore) | Revenue | Profit / (loss) after tax |
| FY17 | 3.24 | (3.71) |
| FY18 | 6.62 | (4.74) |
| FY21 | 8.63 (operating revenue, per MCA filings); Nykaa’s own disclosure cites 19.44 for the same year | (12.76) |
| FY24 | 31.1 | 5.2 (first profit on record) |
- FY19, FY20 and FY22 profit-and-loss figures are not fully available in public filings reviewed for this piece; FY20 revenue is known (₹14.62 crore) but its net loss figure was not found in a citable source, so it is left out rather than estimated.
- FY23 revenue is known (₹16.8 crore, Inc42) but its profit-or-loss line was not disclosed on the same page and has been excluded here for the same reason.
- The FY21 revenue conflict (₹8.63 crore per MCA-filing-based reporting versus ₹19.44 crore per Nykaa’s deal-announcement disclosure) is unresolved in public sources and is flagged rather than averaged.
Where the money comes from
- By revenue type, FY21 (last disclosed split): 92% commission/platform-fee income from listed brands and merchants; 8% direct e-commerce sales through LBB Shop (Entrackr)
- By geography: LBB operated across eight Indian cities as of its FY21 filings, expanded from an initial base of Delhi-NCR, Mumbai and Bengaluru (Entrackr); it does not disclose a city-wise revenue split
- By scale, pre-acquisition (2021): the company claimed 22 million users and 10,000 merchants on the platform (Entrackr); at the time of the Nykaa deal in 2022, Nykaa cited “over 70 million users across various channels,” a broader figure likely including social media reach rather than app users alone (BusinessToday)
- The surprise: even though LBB Shop — the transactional, brand-facing marketplace — was the strategic reason Nykaa wanted the company, that unit generated only a small single-digit share of revenue right up to the year before acquisition. Nykaa bought a content and audience business more than it bought a commerce engine, and the FY24 turnaround came only after LBB was absorbed into Nykaa’s own distribution and brand relationships rather than by LBB Shop scaling on its own.
The risks
- Loss of a standalone financial identity. With Iluminar Media legally merged into Nykaa Fashion Ltd from 1 April 2024 (NCLT approval 27 May 2025), LBB no longer files separate accounts as an independent entity going forward, which means the FY24 profit figure — the best evidence yet that the business works — may be the last clean, LBB-only number the public ever sees (HDFC Sky, Inc42).
- Founder and leadership turnover. Co-founder and CEO Suchita Salwan, the person most identified with LBB’s editorial voice and brand, left the Nykaa group to join Bharti Airtel as chief customer officer, a move reported in December 2025 (Indian Television Dot Com; Exchange4Media). A content-led brand built around a founder’s taste and voice carries real execution risk when that founder exits.
- Headcount contraction even after turning profitable. LBB’s employee count stood at 75 as of 31 May 2025, down about 20% from a year earlier (Tracxn) — a reminder that the FY24 profit came alongside cost discipline and shrinking headcount, not only growth, and that the model still leans on lean, ad-and-commission economics rather than a large, defensible moat.
The takeaway
LBB’s nine years as an independent company are a useful corrective to the idea that a content-to-commerce pivot is mostly a matter of adding a checkout button. LBB added that checkout button in 2018 and it still could not get e-commerce past single digits as a share of revenue by FY21. What actually worked was staying disciplined about what the audience already trusted the platform for — recommendations, not inventory — and then finding a bigger distribution partner willing to plug that trusted content into its own commerce rails. The lesson is not that content businesses cannot make money. It is that the exit which looks like a failure — selling because you cannot raise again — can also be the event that finally lets the business become what it always said it wanted to be.
Frequently asked questions
What does LBB stand for?
LBB stands for Little Black Book, the name Suchita Salwan gave her Tumblr blog of Delhi recommendations in 2011, which later became the LBB app and marketplace.
Who owns LBB now?
LBB’s parent company, Iluminar Media Limited, has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Nykaa Fashion Ltd since the acquisition closed on 10 September 2022, and was legally merged into Nykaa Fashion Ltd with effect from 1 April 2024, following NCLT approval on 27 May 2025.
Is LBB profitable?
Yes, for the first time on record in FY24, when it reported a profit after tax of ₹5.2 crore on revenue of ₹31.1 crore, according to Inc42’s review of its financial filings. Every prior fiscal year with disclosed figures — FY17, FY18 and FY21 — shows a loss.
How does LBB make money?
Mainly through advertising and platform fees paid by the brands and merchants it features, a model its founder compared to Facebook, Google and Instagram; e-commerce sales through LBB Shop have historically been a smaller share of revenue, about 8% in FY21.
Why did LBB sell to Nykaa?
By 2022, LBB had not closed a fresh equity round since April 2019, had lost 41% of its revenue during the pandemic year FY21, and had scaled back its commerce ambitions internally. Reporting by Entrackr and The Ken describes the sale as the most viable option left once fresh fundraising had stalled.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Entrackr, “Little Black Book recorded 2X revenue jump in FY18; losses increased by 27%,” January 2019
- Entrackr, “LBB’s revenue shrinks 41% in FY21, losses reduce by 46%,” November 2021
- Entrackr, “Exclusive: Nykaa to acquire Chiratae-backed Little Black Book,” June 2022
- Inc42 Datalabs, company profile and financials for Little Black Book / Iluminar Media, accessed September 2026
- Inc42 Buzz, “Nykaa Completes 100% Acquisition Of Digital Content Platform Little Black Book,” September 2022
- Inc42 Buzz, “Little Black Book Gets $5 Mn From Japanese And Indian Investors,” April 2019
- Inc42 Buzz, Suchita Salwan AMA on LBB’s transformation from community to recommendation and commerce business, accessed September 2026
- Forbes India, “How Suchita Salwan took LBB from blog to brand marketplace,” Self-Made Women 2020 feature, March 2020
- Business Standard, “Little Black Book, a platform to shop from local brands, raises $5 million,” April 2019
- BusinessToday, “Nykaa receives board approval to acquire Little Black Book,” August 2022
- The Ken, “Why 10-year old LBB had to sell to 10-year old Nykaa,” 2022
- Tracxn, company profile for Little Black Book, accessed September 2026
- HDFC Sky, “Nykaa gets NCLT nod for merger of LBB into Nykaa Fashion,” May 2025
- Indian Television Dot Com, “Suchita Salwan joins Airtel as chief customer officer,” December 2025
- Exchange4Media, “Suchita Salwan steps into Chief Customer Officer role at Airtel,” December 2025
Found an error? Write to us and we’ll correct it in the open, dated, on the piece.