Startup Deep Dive : Lenskart — targeted a $10 billion IPO and listed near $8 billion

Lenskart went public in November 2025 chasing a $10 billion valuation. It listed near $8 billion instead, and the stock fell below its issue price on debut day. Yet the same prospectus showed something rarer than a big number: an eyewear company that spent fifteen years losing money and had just posted its first full year of profit.

That contradiction — a hyped listing that undershot its own target, sitting on top of a business that had genuinely turned a corner — is the real Lenskart story. Strip away the IPO noise and what is left is a retailer that makes its own frames, sells them in over 2,000 stores from Bhiwadi to Bangkok, and only recently figured out how to keep more of every rupee it takes in.

Quick facts

What they do

Lenskart sells prescription eyeglasses, sunglasses and contact lenses to Indian and, increasingly, Asian consumers who need vision correction but have historically been served by fragmented, unbranded optical shops. It does this across two channels that feed each other: a website and app where customers browse frames, try them on virtually and book free home eye check-ups, and a network of more than 2,000 stores in India plus several hundred more overseas under the Lenskart and Owndays brands, where the same customer can get an eye test, pick a frame and walk out with fitted glasses. The company also runs a private eyewear label, John Jacobs, and a manufacturing arm that makes a large share of the frames and lenses it sells, rather than buying finished products from third parties.

The origin

Peyush Bansal worked at Microsoft in Canada before returning to India. His first venture, Flyrr, launched in mid-2009 as a US-focused online store for spectacles, sunglasses and contact lenses. He judged that the same model — cutting out the middleman between an optical lab and the customer — was underexploited in India, where branded eyewear was expensive and unbranded eyewear was untrustworthy. Valyoo Technologies Private Limited was incorporated on 19 May 2008 by Bansal along with Amit Chaudhary, Neha Bansal and Sumeet Kapahi, and its India-facing site, Lenskart.com, went live in November 2010, initially selling only contact lenses. Eyeglasses and sunglasses followed in March 2011, and the first physical store opened in New Delhi in 2013. The founding insight was narrow and specific: vision correction in India was a large, recurring need with almost no organised, trustworthy retail behind it.

The struggle years

Lenskart’s early years were not a straight climb. Around 2011, under pressure from investor IDG Ventures India to build an “online Titan” rather than a single-category eyewear seller, Valyoo diversified into unrelated verticals: Watchkart.com and Bagskart.com launched in 2011, followed by Jewelskart.com in 2012. The logic was that a broader lifestyle-retail bet would grow faster than eyewear alone. It did not work. The four sites split management attention and capital without producing a business investors wanted to fund at scale, and by the time growth stalled across the group, some backers were openly comparing Lenskart’s pace unfavourably with peers.

A second, less visible strain has resurfaced closer to the present. Former franchise partners in Karnataka filed a police complaint in October 2024 at Devaraja Police Station, Mysuru, alleging that Lenskart executives manipulated point-of-sale software to under-report store revenue, falsified accounts and opened company-owned stores in close proximity to their franchise outlets. The franchisees put the disputed amount at over ₹12 crore across 13 stores and later complained to SEBI, in August 2025, that the company’s IPO papers understated the scope of the dispute. Lenskart obtained a stay on the police investigation from the Karnataka High Court in January 2025, and the matter was still contested in court as the company approached listing, as reported by The Ken and by Head & Tale.

The turning point

The decisive break from the multi-vertical detour came through a conversation with early backer Ronnie Screwvala, as recounted in Lenskart’s own retellings of its history and reported by Forbes India. When Bansal admitted he was reluctant to shut Watchkart, Bagskart and Jewelskart because he feared losing the funding tied to their combined scale, Screwvala offered to put in more capital specifically to let him focus on eyewear alone. IDG Ventures India backed the same call, and Valyoo received a fresh round in February 2013. The three non-eyewear sites were wound down over the following two years, and by the end of 2014 Lenskart.com was the only business left standing. The numbers on either side of that decision are instructive: a company running four sub-scale verticals with diffused capital in 2012 became, within roughly a decade of singular focus, a business generating thousands of crores in annual revenue and running the country’s largest eyewear retail network. The lesson embedded in the pivot — cut the ventures that dilute the core, even if it looks like the safer path to keep growth numbers up — became central to how Lenskart later approached manufacturing and geography.

The money behind it

Lenskart’s capital table reads like a tour of global institutional investing over fifteen years. Early support came from IDG Ventures India and TR Capital, but the shape of the company changed after Azim Premji’s family office, Premji Invest, put in roughly ₹200 crore in September 2016 — a vote of confidence from one of India’s more conservative institutional investors that helped Lenskart raise its next, larger rounds. SoftBank’s Vision Fund invested $275 million in December 2019, pushing the valuation past $1 billion for the first time. KKR added $95 million in May 2021, and Temasek and Falcon Edge Capital led a $220 million round in July 2021 at a $2.5 billion valuation. The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority then invested $500 million in March 2023, valuing the company at $4.5 billion, and Temasek and Fidelity returned with a $200 million secondary purchase in 2024 that marked the valuation at around $5 billion. By June 2025, Fidelity had marked its holding up further, implying a valuation near $6.1 billion as Lenskart prepared to file for an IPO targeting as much as $10 billion, according to Business Standard. Across its life, funding trackers such as Inc42 and Tracxn put Lenskart’s total primary and secondary fundraising at more than $2 billion. Each investor changed something concrete: Premji Invest lent credibility for later foreign capital, SoftBank funded the store rollout and the Bhiwadi manufacturing build-out, and ADIA and Temasek’s later cheques funded the $400 million Owndays acquisition and international expansion.

How it makes money

Lenskart earns the way most optical retailers do — selling a pair of glasses, sunglasses or a supply of contact lenses, plus add-ons like premium lens coatings and its Lenskart Gold membership, which had around 68 lakh members enrolled by FY25 and drives repeat visits and eye check-ups. What is different is where the margin comes from. A typical optical retailer buys finished frames and lenses from manufacturers and marks them up; Lenskart instead makes a large share of what it sells in its own facility in Bhiwadi, Rajasthan — a roughly 10.7-acre, heavily automated plant described in the company’s own filings and in trade coverage as among the largest centralised prescription-eyewear manufacturing sites globally by capacity, producing millions of frames and lenses a year. Because it controls manufacturing, Lenskart keeps the margin a third-party supplier would otherwise take, and its own private label, John Jacobs, which industry coverage puts at around a fifth to a quarter of total sales, carries a materially better margin than eyewear bought in from outside brands since Lenskart owns the design and the factory output rather than sharing revenue with a brand licensor. The part people get wrong is assuming Lenskart is primarily an e-commerce company; the DRHP-era disclosures and analyst notes on the business show stores, not the website, generate the bulk of transactions, with digital serving mainly as the discovery and booking layer that feeds store footfall. The trade-off is that vertical integration and rapid store expansion are capital- and cost-intensive — in FY25, material costs, employee costs and marketing together still consumed the overwhelming share of every rupee of revenue, which is precisely why profitability arrived only in the fifteenth year.

The numbers

Lenskart’s revenue and profitability track record, drawn from its financial disclosures ahead of listing, shows a business that only recently crossed into net profit after years of narrowing losses:

Revenue nearly doubled between FY23 and FY25 while the bottom line swung from a loss of nearly ₹64 crore to a profit of ₹297 crore. Total expenses in FY25 rose 19% to about ₹6,619 crore, against revenue growth of 22.5%, which is the arithmetic behind the swing into profit: costs grew slower than sales for the first time at this scale. Reported EBITDA margin for FY25 stood at 2.27%, and return on capital employed at 6.17%, according to figures reported by Entrackr and BW Marketing World from the DRHP — both flagging that profitability, while real, is still thin relative to the scale of the balance sheet built to get there.

Where the money comes from

Two splits matter. By geography, India contributed about ₹4,015 crore of FY25 operating revenue, up 27% year on year, while international markets — chiefly Owndays’ footprint across Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, plus West Asia — added roughly ₹2,638 crore, up 17%. That means close to two out of every five rupees Lenskart books now come from outside India, a meaningfully more international mix than most Indian consumer-retail IPOs of the past few years. By product, the sale of eyewear and lenses made up the bulk of revenue at ₹6,360 crore, with services such as memberships and eye check-ups a smaller ₹133 crore. The surprise for anyone assuming this is a discount, volume-driven Indian retailer is how large the premium, international leg has become: Owndays alone extended Lenskart’s footprint to 13 Asian markets after the 2022 acquisition, and that international business is not a rounding error — it is close to 40% of group revenue.

The risks

Three risks stand out, each with a concrete mechanism rather than a vague caveat. First, the Karnataka franchisee dispute is not fully resolved: a criminal complaint alleging accounting manipulation and a SEBI complaint alleging disclosure lapses in the IPO papers were both live as the company listed, and an adverse outcome in court could reopen questions about how store-level revenue has historically been reported. Second, Lenskart’s manufacturing depends in part on imported components and a joint venture, Baofeng Framekart, tied to Chinese supply chains, alongside heavy concentration of its own production in the Gurugram-Bhiwadi belt of north India — any disruption to that single corridor, whether logistical, regulatory or trade-related, would hit a company that has deliberately chosen to make rather than buy. Third, the market itself is getting more competitive and margins remain thin: India’s organised eyewear market is a small fraction — commonly cited around a quarter — of a total eyewear industry valued near $9.2 billion in FY25, according to industry estimates cited in IPO research notes, meaning most of Lenskart’s addressable growth still has to be won away from unorganised, unbranded shops one customer at a time, at an EBITDA margin that stood at just 2.27% in the year it first turned a profit.

The takeaway

Lenskart’s most transferable lesson has nothing to do with eyewear specifically. It is that owning the factory, not just the storefront, is what eventually lets a low-margin retail category become a profitable one — but that ownership takes far longer to pay off than investors price in, which is exactly why a company with a genuinely improving business could still list below its own target valuation. Vertical integration is a bet you make years before the numbers justify it, and the market only believes the bet once the profit shows up on paper, by which point most of the hard, expensive building has already happened out of public view.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded Lenskart and when?

Lenskart was incorporated as Valyoo Technologies Private Limited on 19 May 2008 by Peyush Bansal, Neha Bansal, Amit Chaudhary and Sumeet Kapahi. Its India website, Lenskart.com, launched in November 2010, which the company treats as its founding year in the market.

Is Lenskart profitable?

Yes, for the first time at this scale in FY25, when it reported a net profit of ₹297 crore on revenue of ₹6,653 crore, having posted a net loss of ₹10 crore in FY24 and ₹63.7 crore in FY23, as per its financial disclosures ahead of listing.

What was Lenskart’s IPO valuation?

Reports ahead of the IPO, including Fidelity’s internal markup covered by Business Standard, pointed to a target valuation of around $10 billion. The company’s actual public debut on 10 November 2025 valued it closer to $8 billion, a shortfall covered by both Business Standard and CNBC.

Who are Lenskart’s biggest investors?

Institutional backers built up over multiple rounds include Premji Invest, SoftBank Vision Fund, KKR, Temasek, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and Fidelity, alongside anchor investors such as GIC and BlackRock who bought in ahead of the IPO.

How does Lenskart make most of its money?

Primarily through owning its supply chain: it manufactures a large share of the frames and lenses it sells at its own facility in Bhiwadi, Rajasthan, and sells them through stores and its private label John Jacobs, which lets it retain margin that third-party brands and outsourced manufacturing would otherwise absorb.

Sources

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

• Wikipedia, “Lenskart” and “Peyush Bansal” entries, accessed September 2026
• Forbes India, “Adjust focus: How Peyush Bansal built Lenskart into a profitable unicorn”
• Inc42, “Lenskart Raises INR 160 Cr From Peyush Bansal, Other Cofounders”
• Inc42, “IPO-Bound Lenskart In The Black, Posts INR 297 Cr Profit In FY25”, July 2025
• Entrackr, “Decoding Lenskart FY25 numbers”, July 2025
• BW Marketing World, “IPO-bound Lenskart Scales Rs 6,415 Cr Revenue In FY25”
• InCred Money, “Lenskart Solutions Private Limited” unlisted-shares financial profile
• Business Standard, “Fidelity marks up Lenskart to $6.1 bn ahead of planned $10 bn IPO”, June 2025
• Business Standard, “Lenskart raises ₹3,268 crore from 147 anchor investors ahead of IPO”, 31 October 2025
• Business Standard, “Lenskart’s $821 mn IPO price sparks concern over Indian startup valuations”, November 2025
• CNBC, “SoftBank-backed Lenskart wobbles after volatile debut despite oversubscribed IPO”, 10 November 2025
• TechBuzz, “Lenskart IPO sparks $8B valuation debate after rocky debut”, November 2025
• Business Standard, Lenskart Solutions Ltd share price and market capitalisation data, 30 December 2025
• TechCrunch, “Lenskart acquires majority stake in eyewear brand Owndays in $400 million deal”, 30 June 2022
• Business Standard, “ADIA nears a deal to acquire $500 million stake in Lenskart Solutions”, March 2023
• Business Standard, “Lenskart raises $200 million in secondary round at $5 billion valuation”, June 2024
• The Ken, “Lenskart built its empire on franchisees. Now it’s battling them in courts”
• Head & Tale, “Lenskart IPO: Franchisees complain to SEBI over disclosure lapses”, August 2025
• FashionNetwork India, “Lenskart private label John Jacobs now accounts for almost a quarter of total sales”
• Kotak Neo, “Lenskart IPO: India’s ₹1.5 Trillion Eyewear Market Revolution” and “Lenskart FY25 Revenue, Profit, Market Share & Growth Breakdown Ahead of IPO”

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