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Startup Deep Dive : Nasher Miles — TV valued it at Rs 200 crore the same year its filings show a loss

The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for Nasher Miles.

In February 2024, five investors on prime-time television valued Nasher Miles at ₹200 crore ($20.8 million, at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026, Trading Economics) — a bag brand that had never taken a single rupee of outside money in its six-and-a-half years of existence. The same company, regulatory filings show, closed that financial year with a net loss of ₹6.26 crore even as revenue nearly tripled.

That contradiction — a made-for-TV valuation landing in the same year as a filed loss — is the real story of Nasher Miles. This is a look at how a Mumbai-founded, marketplace-first luggage brand went from reselling other people’s products to commanding a nine-figure-dollar price tag, what its actual filed numbers say about the business underneath the headline, and where the growth is genuinely coming from.

Quick facts

Company Nasher Miles Private Limited
Founded August 2017, Mumbai (founders were marketplace resellers from 2014)
Founders Abhishek Daga (Chairman), Lokesh Daga (CEO), Shruti Kedia Daga (Marketing Head)
Businesses Hard-side and soft-side luggage, backpacks, duffels, kids’ trolleys and travel accessories, sold online and offline
Latest FY revenue ₹145.5 crore, FY25, down 13.3% from ₹167.8 crore in FY24 (as per Inc42’s company financial tracker; Tofler independently shows a comparable 13.27% revenue decline for the same year)
Latest FY profit/loss Net profit margin of about 3.8% in FY25 (as per Tofler); FY24 closed with a net loss of ₹6.26 crore against a FY23 net profit of ₹5.53 crore (company financial statement filed with the FY24 accounts)
Listed Private — no IPO filed or announced
Market value / last valuation $30 million post-money (bridge round, July 2024); Shark Tank India valued the company at ₹200 crore (~$20.8 million) in February 2024
Key shareholders / CEO Lokesh Daga (CEO); founder-directors hold the company; external backers include Singularity Early Opportunities Fund and the five Shark Tank India investors

What they do

Nasher Miles designs and sells travel gear — hard-side and soft-side trolley bags, backpacks, duffels, kids’ luggage and travel accessories — aimed at younger Indian travellers who found the established luggage aisle, dominated by muted greys and blacks, boring. It runs an omnichannel model: its own website, more than a dozen online marketplaces, quick-commerce apps, and a fast-growing offline network of multi-brand stores, modern-trade chains and a handful of exclusive outlets. The company positions itself in the “mass premium” band of the market, priced above legacy value brands but below imported premium names, and has run cricketer Rishabh Pant as brand ambassador.

The origin

Abhishek Daga, Lokesh Daga and Shruti Kedia Daga did not start out building a brand. From 2014, the trio worked as online resellers, listing other companies’ products across categories on Amazon, Flipkart, Tata CLiQ and Myntra. It was through that reselling business that they noticed a specific gap: functional luggage was easy to find, but nothing on the shelf spoke to a generation of Indians who were suddenly flying more — fuller airports, normalised weekend trips, students heading abroad for study — and wanted bags with colour and personality rather than another grey suitcase. In August 2017, they folded that observation into a private-label brand of their own, and Nasher Miles was registered as a company.

The struggle years

Nasher Miles has not publicised a near-death moment the way some startups do — there is no disclosed brush with insolvency or a lawsuit that nearly ended it — but two structural pivots are on the record, and neither was easy.

The turning point

The turning point has a date: 28 February 2024, the day Nasher Miles’ episode of Shark Tank India season 3 aired. It was the show’s first-ever face-off between two luggage brands — Nasher Miles pitched right after Assembly, which had asked for ₹85 lakh for 1% equity, implying an ₹8.5 crore valuation. Nasher Miles asked for far more: ₹3 crore for 0.75% equity, implying a valuation of roughly ₹400 crore. The five sharks in the room — Aman Gupta, Anupam Mittal, Vineeta Singh, Namita Thapar and Ritesh Agarwal — did not accept that number. They countered, and closed, at ₹3 crore for 1.5% equity plus a 1% royalty until the ₹3 crore was recouped: a deal that valued the company at ₹200 crore, half of what the founders had walked in asking for. It was only the season’s second all-five-shark deal. On one side of the turning point: a profitable, six-year-old, zero-external-funding business asking to be valued at ₹400 crore. On the other: a nationally broadcast ₹200 crore mark, and the company’s first outside cheque.

The money behind it

Nasher Miles ran on its own cash for more than six years before taking any institutional or angel money. Two rounds followed within months of each other in 2024, and startup-funding trackers put its total external funding at $4.28 million (about ₹38 crore, per the company’s own figure to Entrepreneur India), across:

How it makes money

Nasher Miles sells the same catalogue — reportedly more than 60 designs and around 2,000 SKUs across colours and formats — through several channels at once, and the channel mix is the crux of its economics.

On the cost side, the lever the company talks about most is where its goods are made. Finished bags and components sourced from abroad are priced in dollars and exposed to shipping costs and the rupee; shifting production onshore — from roughly 88% imported toward a stated 80–85% domestic target — is explicitly aimed at protecting margin rather than just an “India-made” marketing line (Entrepreneur India; Indian Retailer). Neither marketplace commission rates nor a per-channel take rate have been publicly disclosed, and none is invented here.

The numbers

Figures below are as reported to fiscal-year-end (unit: ₹ crore). Nasher Miles does not publish a multi-year results statement of its own; these are drawn from its financial-data trackers and, for FY24/FY23, from the company’s own filed financial statement.

Fiscal year Revenue (₹ crore) Net profit / (loss) (₹ crore)
FY23 Not independently confirmed this session 5.53 (profit)
FY24 167.8 (6.26) (loss)
FY25 145.5 (Tofler: ₹100–150 crore band), down ~13.3% YoY Net margin ~3.8% (implies a return to profit)

Where the money comes from

The risks

For scale, the category itself is not an easy one to make money in even for a well-funded peer: Mokobara, a direct comparable in premium D2C luggage, reported ₹117.4 crore in FY24 revenue against a ₹4.24 crore net loss — itself an improvement on an ₹8.21 crore loss the year before (Entrackr). Thin or negative margins at scale appear to be a category-wide feature, not a Nasher Miles-specific failing.

The takeaway

A televised valuation and a filed financial result are two different currencies, and it is worth not confusing them. The same year Nasher Miles was valued at ₹200 crore on national television, its own paperwork shows a net loss. Neither number is false — a valuation is a bet on where a business is going, a profit-and-loss statement is a record of where it has been — but only one of them shows up on a balance sheet. The transferable lesson for founders chasing a marquee valuation moment, on a shark tank or otherwise, is that the number investors agree to pay for future growth can arrive in the same year the accounts show the present cost of chasing it.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded Nasher Miles and when?

Nasher Miles was founded in August 2017 by Abhishek Daga, Lokesh Daga and Shruti Kedia Daga, who had run a multi-category online reselling business together from 2014 before launching their own luggage brand.

Is Nasher Miles profitable?

It has not been consistently so. The company’s filed financial statement shows a net profit of ₹5.53 crore in FY23 followed by a net loss of ₹6.26 crore in FY24; Tofler’s tracker shows the net margin recovering to roughly 3.8% in FY25.

How much funding has Nasher Miles raised, and at what valuation?

Startup-funding trackers put total external funding at $4.28 million (about ₹38 crore) across an early-2024 angel round tied to its Shark Tank India appearance and a July 2024 bridge round. The most recent disclosed valuation is $30 million post-money, from the July 2024 round; Shark Tank India valued the company at ₹200 crore in February 2024.

What happened on Nasher Miles’ Shark Tank India appearance?

On the episode that aired 28 February 2024 (season 3), all five sharks — Aman Gupta, Anupam Mittal, Vineeta Singh, Namita Thapar and Ritesh Agarwal — jointly invested ₹3 crore for 1.5% equity plus a 1% royalty until that amount was recouped, valuing the company at ₹200 crore, half of the ₹400 crore the founders had originally sought.

Where does Nasher Miles actually sell its products?

Across roughly 14 online marketplaces, its own D2C website, quick-commerce apps, and an offline network of 1,300-plus multi-brand stores, modern-trade chains and a small, growing base of exclusive brand outlets, per company and trade-press disclosures.

Sources

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

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