Startup Deep Dive : Minimalist — the Jaipur brand that raised money once and sold to HUL for Rs 2,955 crore

In January 2025, Hindustan Unilever agreed to buy 90.5% of Minimalist, a Jaipur skincare brand that had taken outside money exactly once in its life, in a deal that valued the business at ₹2,955 crore (~$308 million, converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) — more than five times what its only external backers had paid for a stake in 2021. The same set of accounts that justified that price also carried a loss: in the year the deal closed, Minimalist’s revenue crossed ₹500 crore for the first time and its bottom line swung to a net loss of ₹31.5 crore.

That contradiction — a record year that reads like a setback on paper — is the story of how a brand built by two brothers who had already failed at four businesses became the biggest single check Hindustan Unilever has written for an Indian beauty startup, and why the number on the loss line matters less than what caused it.

Quick facts

What they do

Minimalist sells skincare, haircare and body-care products built around a single, published “active” ingredient per formula — a 10% niacinamide serum, a 2% salicylic acid cleanser, a 0.3% retinol night cream — with the percentage printed on the bottle instead of a marketing story about botanicals. It sources these actives from global ingredient suppliers such as BASF and Croda, tests formulations in-house, and sells more than 50 SKUs mainly to young, research-inclined Indian buyers who discovered the category through the same wave of interest that made Deciem’s The Ordinary a cult brand overseas. Roughly 90% of sales run through the brand’s own website, Amazon and Nykaa, with a growing share now coming through quick-commerce apps; the brand also ships to seven international markets including the United States, the United Kingdom and the UAE.

The origin

Mohit and Rahul Yadav are brothers from Jaipur who had already spent twelve years building and closing businesses together before Minimalist. Their first venture, Scopial, an online t-shirt store Rahul started in 2008 while at IIT Roorkee, was rebranded as the kids’-fashion platform Mango Street and sold to Hushbabies in 2012. Both brothers then spent roughly four years, from 2013 to 2017, at CarDekho — Mohit as vice-president, Rahul as director of products — before leaving to build a customised hair-care startup called Freewill in 2018. Rahul’s training as a chemical engineer from IIT Roorkee shaped what came next: the brothers had watched Freewill struggle to scale a personalisation model, and they had watched Indian skincare shelves stay full of vague “natural” claims while a niche international audience moved toward ingredient transparency. Minimalist launched in October 2020 with a single Instagram post to a following of 200–300 people and a first batch of 1,000 bottles. The stock sold out within days.

The struggle years

The clearest near-death in the founders’ history predates Minimalist: Freewill, their customised hair-care business launched in 2018, could not scale its personalisation model and was wound down within about two years — the direct reason the brothers pivoted to a standardised, ingredient-first product line rather than trying to customise formulas per customer again. Within Minimalist itself, the sharpest stumble is visible in the FY23 accounts. Net profit fell 68%, from ₹16 crore in FY22 to ₹5.2 crore in FY23, even as revenue grew 70.3% to ₹184 crore — the result of headcount rising from roughly 80 to about 650 employees in a single year, alongside a near-doubling of advertising spend to fund growth. It is an uncomfortable but common startup pattern: growing the team and the marketing budget faster than the bottom line could absorb, and choosing to keep growing rather than protect the profit line.

The turning point

The turning point was the HUL deal itself, announced on 22 January 2025. Before it: Minimalist was an independent, majority founder-owned company that had raised one funding round — a $15 million (₹110 crore) Series A in July 2021 led by Peak XV Partners with participation from Unilever Ventures, valuing the company at around ₹565 crore ($65 million, as reported at the time). It had been profitable in most years since inception. After it: HUL agreed to pay ₹2,670 crore in cash for a 90.5% secondary stake plus a ₹45 crore primary infusion, pricing the business at a pre-money enterprise valuation of ₹2,955 crore — close to ten times FY24 revenue, against a typical four-to-six-times multiple for Indian D2C deals, according to sector analysis published on ajuniorvc.com. The deal closed by around April 2025 at a cash consideration reported near ₹2,706 crore, with founders Mohit and Rahul Yadav agreeing to run the business for two more years and HUL holding an option to buy out the remaining 9.5% within two years of completion. The numbers on either side of that one signature moved from “small, profitable, founder-run” to “nearly ten-figure valuation, majority-owned by a listed multinational, first loss-making year on record.”

The money behind it

Minimalist’s funding history is unusually thin for a company that sold for close to $300 million. Its first outside capital came from Peak XV Partners’ Surge programme around 2019–2020, reported at about $2 million in seed funding. The only priced round after that was the July 2021 Series A: $15 million (₹110 crore) led by Peak XV Partners, with Unilever Ventures — the venture arm of HUL’s parent Unilever — joining as an investor nearly four years before the parent company would go on to buy the brand outright. That early, small Unilever Ventures cheque effectively gave Unilever a front-row seat to Minimalist’s growth long before the 2025 acquisition talks. Mohit Yadav has since said in an Outlook Business interview published in July 2025 that, in hindsight, he would have avoided venture funding altogether given the business was profitable enough to use bank debt instead, calling VC money “the highest cost of capital” for a company that did not strictly need it. Total funding raised before the HUL deal is reported at roughly $15–17 million (₹110–125 crore) — a fraction of the deal price.

How it makes money

Minimalist earns money the way most D2C beauty brands do — selling directly to consumers online at full price rather than through heavy discounting or celebrity-fronted mass retail — but its cost structure differs in where it spends. Cost of materials ran to roughly a third of revenue in its scaled years, reflecting in-house manufacturing and sourcing actives from established global suppliers rather than white-labelling. Advertising and promotion is the single largest cost line: it rose from ₹65 crore in FY23 to ₹117 crore in FY24 to ₹154 crore in FY25, consistently above 30% of total expenses, because a young, single-round-funded brand had to buy the visibility that legacy FMCG players get from decades of shelf presence. Employee costs and distribution/logistics account for most of the rest. The part outsiders tend to get wrong is assuming a “no-frills,” bottle-with-a-percentage-on-it brand is cheap to run: Minimalist’s 60% repeat-purchase rate — roughly three times the D2C beauty industry norm, according to reporting cited in Outlook Business — is the reason the model works, because it lowers the effective cost of keeping a customer even while first-time acquisition through paid ads stays expensive. In FY25 the company reported it spent close to ₹0.98 to earn every ₹1 of revenue, before the one-time exceptional charge.

The numbers

Revenue nearly doubled between FY23 and FY24 (up 88.7%) and grew a further 48.2% in FY25 to cross ₹500 crore for the first time. Profit did not move in a straight line: it fell in FY23 on team expansion, recovered and more than doubled in FY24, then reversed into a ₹31.5 crore net loss in FY25 — a swing driven by a ₹46 crore one-time exceptional charge that the company’s regulatory filings did not itemise in public reporting, though the timing lines up with acquisition-related costs ahead of the HUL deal’s close. Stripping that charge out, FY25 EBITDA was a positive ₹18 crore, an EBITDA margin of about 3.45%, down from the higher net margins of FY22–FY24 as advertising spend kept pace with revenue growth.

Where the money comes from

Online-first is the headline split: roughly 90% of Minimalist’s sales run through its own website and marketplaces such as Amazon and Nykaa, a mix that has helped it hold pricing discipline that discount-driven retail rarely allows. Within India, quick-commerce apps such as Blinkit, Zepto and Swiggy Instamart have become a fast-growing channel for beauty broadly — the category is now Blinkit’s second-largest by daily sales, at 13.4% — and skincare brands with a strong online DNA, Minimalist among them, have been early beneficiaries of that shift, though the company has not published an exact quick-commerce revenue share. The surprise is less about channel than about product mix: a brand built on percentage-labelled actives now also sells baby care, launched in June 2024, and has pushed into body and lip care — categories with less “scientific” positioning than the serums that built the brand, suggesting the growth math increasingly depends on breadth as much as on the original active-ingredient promise. International sales across seven markets remain a minority of revenue, with India still the core market by a wide margin.

The risks

The first risk is brand dilution under new ownership, and it is not hypothetical — it is the central question raised by industry watchers since the deal closed. Shantanu Deshpande, founder of rival Bombay Shaving Company, said publicly that Minimalist “will not survive or remain relevant in its current form in the next 3-5 years” once a large FMCG parent’s marketing playbook — heavier ad spend, broader distribution — starts to outweigh the product-led approach that built the brand, a concern echoed by brand strategists warning that HUL’s scale could put “branding over the soul in products,” as reported by Outlook Business in July 2025. Precedents cited in that reporting cut both ways: Beardo lost its youth-centric identity after Marico’s acquisition and Dollar Shave Club’s connection with consumers weakened post-acquisition, while Estée Lauder’s ownership of The Ordinary is held up as a case where founder-era positioning survived integration. The second risk is repeat-purchase erosion: Minimalist’s 60% repeat rate is the engine of its unit economics, and any perceptible drop in formulation quality or a shift toward discount-led retail — the exact pattern the brand built itself in opposition to — would raise customer-acquisition costs that are already elevated. The third is regulatory and competitive exposure in the categories it has just entered: baby care and expanded body/lip care lines carry different compliance requirements than the actives-led serums that built its reputation, and international expansion into seven markets brings it up against established local players and different regulatory regimes with less brand recognition to lean on.

The takeaway

The transferable lesson is not “build a great product and get acquired” — it is that staying small on the capital side for as long as possible preserved Minimalist’s negotiating position. A company that raises one funding round in five years, stays profitable through most of them, and only takes a loss the year it signs an acquisition, walks into that negotiation as the scarcer asset rather than the desperate one. Mohit Yadav’s own regret — that he would have skipped venture funding altogether if profitability alone could have unlocked bank debt — is a pointed reminder that funding rounds are a tool, not a milestone, and that the leverage in any acquisition conversation sits with whichever side needed the deal less.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded Minimalist and when?

Brothers Mohit and Rahul Yadav founded Minimalist in October 2020 in Jaipur, after four earlier ventures together including the kids’-fashion platform Mango Street, sold in 2012, and the customised hair-care startup Freewill, launched in 2018 and later wound down.

What exactly did Hindustan Unilever buy?

HUL agreed on 22 January 2025 to buy a 90.5% stake in Minimalist’s parent, Uprising Science Private Limited, for a cash consideration reported around ₹2,670–2,706 crore plus a ₹45 crore primary infusion, at a pre-money enterprise valuation of ₹2,955 crore. HUL has an option to acquire the remaining 9.5% within two years of the deal’s completion, and the founders have agreed to continue running the business for two years.

Why did Minimalist post a loss in FY25 if the business was growing?

Revenue grew 48.2% to ₹514.8 crore in FY25, but the company recorded a one-time exceptional charge of ₹46 crore, which pushed it to a net loss of ₹31.5 crore even though EBITDA stayed positive at ₹18 crore. Public filings have not itemised the exceptional charge, though its timing coincides with costs tied to the HUL acquisition process.

How much funding did Minimalist raise before being acquired?

Minimalist raised roughly $2 million in seed funding through Peak XV Partners’ Surge programme around 2019–2020, followed by a $15 million (₹110 crore) Series A in July 2021 led by Peak XV Partners with Unilever Ventures participating — a total of about $15–17 million before the 2025 acquisition, against a deal value of roughly $308 million.

Will Minimalist stay headquartered in Jaipur after the acquisition?

Yes. Cofounder Mohit Yadav said in a March 2025 interview that the company has no plans to relocate and will keep its base in Jaipur, citing the city’s short commute times and lower pollution compared with a metro headquarters.

Sources

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

• TechCrunch, “Hindustan Unilever acquires Peak XV-backed Minimalist for over $340M”, January 2025
• Entrepreneur India, “HUL Acquires Skincare Brand Minimalist in INR 2,955 Cr Deal to Expand Beauty Portfolio”, January 2025
• Inc42, “How D2C Brand Minimalist Built An INR 100 Cr Business Within Eight Months Of Inception”, April 2024
• Inc42, “Jaipur Will Continue To Be Our Base: Minimalist’s Mohit Yadav After HUL’s INR 3K Cr Acquisition”, March 2025
• Entrackr, “Skin care brand Minimalist revenue balloons 8X with profit in last two fiscals”, December 2023
• Entrackr, “D2C brand Minimalist posts Rs 350 Cr revenue in FY24, doubles profit”, September 2024
• Entrackr, “HUL-owned Minimalist revenue spikes 48% to Rs 515 Cr in FY25”, February 2026
• Outlook Business, “Can Science-First Beauty Brand Minimalist Retain Its Edge in HUL’s Hands?”, July 2025
• ajuniorvc.com, “How 3,000 Cr Minimalist Became India’s Cleanest Beauty Brand”, 2025

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