Startup Deep Dive : Noise — India’s largest smartwatch brand swung from a loss to a tax-aided profit in a year

Noise sold four smartwatches every minute at its 2020 peak, according to the company’s own telling of that year, and built the most recognisable Indian name in wearable technology. Yet the same company, still the category’s best-known homegrown brand, posted a net loss of Rs 20 crore in the year ended March 2024 (FY24) — even as its revenue crossed Rs 1,431 crore, per financial statements filed with the Registrar of Companies and reported by Entrackr.

A year later the numbers moved again, in the opposite direction on two different lines at once: revenue from operations fell 24% to Rs 1,048 crore (~$109 million, at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) in FY25, and the company reported a profit of Rs 3.2 crore — but only after a Rs 47 crore deferred tax gain, per Entrackr’s reporting on the same filings. That is the story this piece tries to explain: how a brand that out-marketed Apple, Samsung and Fitbit to lead India’s smartwatch shelf still runs on margins thin enough that a tax entry decides whether the year reads as a profit or a loss.

Quick facts

What they do

Noise designs and sells budget-to-mid-range wearable electronics — smartwatches, true wireless (TWS) earbuds, smart rings and, more recently, screenless fitness bands and speakers — to price-conscious Indian buyers, largely in their teens through thirties, who want the look and basic functions of an Apple Watch or a Fitbit without the price tag. The bulk of its volumes still comes from smartwatches sold through online marketplaces such as Amazon and Flipkart and its own direct-to-consumer website, alongside a growing offline retail footprint. The pitch has always been the same: fashion-forward design, a long features list (heart-rate tracking, Bluetooth calling, AMOLED displays on higher-end models) and a price that undercuts global brands by a wide margin.

The origin

Gaurav Khatri and Amit Khatri grew up as cousins in Bikaner. Gaurav flew as a commercial pilot; Amit had spent years in textile sourcing and manufacturing, including work designing and supplying products for international retail brands. The founding insight was almost accidental: Gaurav wanted a phone case that was not sold in India, the pair imported it, then noticed there was a business in importing and reselling accessories that Indian buyers could not easily find. In 2014 they pooled roughly Rs 7 crore of personal savings, tied up with Chinese manufacturers, and began selling phone covers and accessories on eBay, spending nothing on advertising in those first years, according to accounts of the company’s founding carried by Storyboard18 and The Better India. The trading business was profitable from early on — but by their own later admission, it was a trading business, not a brand.

The struggle years

The first documented crisis was one of identity, not cash. By late 2017, Noise’s phone-accessory trading operation was doing well on sales and margins but had built no brand equity of its own — anyone could undercut a reseller of generic imported goods. The founders responded by pivoting into wearables (Bluetooth earphones, then smartwatches) starting in 2016, a category with no guaranteed payoff and where Noise had no manufacturing or design edge over larger rivals; revenue in the early wearables years stayed modest, reported at roughly Rs 24 crore in 2018 before the category began to compound.

The second, more recent setback came after a decade of uninterrupted growth: FY24 (year ended March 2024) closed with Noise’s first reported net loss — Rs 20 crore — even as the company remained India’s best-selling smartwatch brand by volume, because marketing spend (Rs 286 crore) and a 53% jump in employee costs outran flat revenue, per Entrackr’s account of the company’s filings. The third came in FY25, when revenue fell 24% year-on-year to Rs 1,048 crore as the broader Indian smartwatch market extended a shipment decline that, per IDC and Counterpoint Research data, has now run for ten consecutive quarters through Q2 2026 — meaning Noise’s post-loss recovery arrived in a category that was structurally shrinking under it.

The turning point

The turning point was the wearables pivot meeting the 2020 pandemic at the right time. Noise had launched its ColorFit smartwatch line in 2018 and the higher-volume ColorFit Pro 2 in 2019; as COVID-19 pushed people indoors and into health-and-fitness tracking, demand for affordable smartwatches accelerated sharply through 2020. Reported figures for that stretch show revenue climbing from about Rs 49 crore in FY19 to roughly Rs 156 crore in FY20 and then to Rs 350.55 crore in FY21, before more than doubling again to Rs 792.79 crore in FY22 — a 126% jump on the prior year, per Entrackr’s report on the company’s FY22 filings. By the other side of that run, Counterpoint Research and IDC were independently naming Noise India’s largest smartwatch brand by shipments, a position that reporting from both agencies shows it continued to hold through 2024 and into 2025.

The money behind it

Noise ran as a bootstrapped company for almost a decade, funded only by founder capital, before taking any outside money. That changed in December 2023, when Bose Corporation — the US audio company — made a strategic, minority investment of close to $10 million in Nexxbase Marketing, Noise’s parent, in what was structured as a Series A round, per Entrackr and YourStory. The deal valued Noise at roughly $400–460 million (reported, BW Disrupt). Bose followed on in April 2025 with a further $20 million (about Rs 172 crore), routed through compulsorily convertible debentures, taking the reported valuation to around $470 million.

Bose is Noise’s only disclosed external investor to date. The relationship runs beyond capital: Bose separately appointed Nexxbase as the distributor for its own products across online and digital retail channels in India, and the partnership is reported to give Noise access to Bose’s R&D capability as it tries to move into more premium wearables and, eventually, international markets. Total disclosed external funding across the two rounds is roughly $30 million — a modest sum next to the roughly $470 million valuation and the more than Rs 1,000 crore in annual revenue it is backing.

How it makes money

Noise earns money the way any consumer-hardware company does: it sells physical devices — smartwatches, earbuds, rings, bands — for a price above what it costs to source and ship them, mostly through online marketplaces, its own D2C site and a growing offline retail network. There is no meaningful subscription or software-services revenue disclosed; each sale is a one-time transaction. On the cost side, the filings tell a story that looks more like electronics assembly than a high-margin D2C brand: in FY24, material procurement alone was Rs 989 crore, or 67.7% of total expenditure, reflecting heavy dependence on components and finished-goods manufacturing sourced largely from China. Marketing and advertising was the next-largest line at Rs 286 crore in FY24 (cut by 37% to Rs 180 crore in FY25) — in a category crowded with near-identical Chinese-origin rivals such as Fire-Boltt and GoBoult, and boAt at the top, customer acquisition itself is a recurring, unavoidable cost rather than a one-time brand-building spend.

The part people get wrong is assuming Noise’s market-leading volumes translate into market-leading margins. They do not: EBITDA margin was just 0.83% in FY24 and 1.67% in FY25, and Return on Capital Employed was 5.36% and 7.31% respectively, per Entrackr’s analysis of the filings — figures typical of a thin-margin hardware assembler, not a premium brand with pricing power. FY25’s headline “return to profit” of Rs 3.2 crore is a useful illustration: strip out the Rs 47 crore deferred tax gain that year, and the underlying operating business would have posted a loss for a second consecutive year.

The numbers

Figures below are revenue from operations and net profit/loss for four consecutive financial years, as reported by Entrackr, YourStory, Inc42 and DTNext based on filings with the Registrar of Companies. All figures in Rs crore.

Read across the four years, the pattern is: explosive growth through FY22, growth stalling but still positive in FY23 even as profit nearly vanished, an outright loss in FY24 despite roughly flat revenue, and then a sharp 24% revenue contraction in FY25 alongside a wafer-thin, tax-assisted profit. Three different financial years, three different outcomes, on a business that outside observers still describe simply as “India’s No.1 smartwatch brand.”

Where the money comes from

By category, Noise remains overwhelmingly a watch company: wearables (smartwatches, bands and rings together) made up 79.8% of FY24 revenue, with audio products (TWS earbuds and speakers) contributing 19.7% and the remainder coming from scrap sales, services and interest income, per Entrackr’s breakdown of the FY24 filings. That concentration is the surprise for a brand that markets itself as a broad wearables-and-audio company: four of every five rupees still come from a single, increasingly saturated product line.

Geographically, the business is still overwhelmingly Indian. Employment data compiled by Revelio Labs shows about 93% of Nexxbase’s workforce based in South Asia, consistent with a company that has taken only early steps abroad — a UK storefront under the Noise brand, a “Noise Lab” subsidiary registered in China, and a 50% joint venture with Stelltek Technologies disclosed alongside the FY24 filings — none of which come with a disclosed export-revenue split. In effect, Noise sells an India-market product at India-market prices to Indian buyers, and the international units so far look more like sourcing and brand-building outposts than revenue centres.

The risks

The first risk is structural, not company-specific: India’s smartwatch category itself is shrinking. Shipments have now declined for ten consecutive quarters through Q2 2026, per Counterpoint Research and IDC tracking, falling a further 4% year-on-year in that quarter to 6.38 million units even as average selling prices rose 8.8% to $21 — a market moving toward fewer, pricier units, which squeezes a volume-led, value-priced player like Noise on both counts. Since wearables supply close to 80% of Noise’s revenue, this is not a diversifiable risk; it sits at the centre of the business.

The second is intellectual-property exposure in the very categories Noise is counting on to diversify away from smartwatches. In December 2025, wearables maker Oura filed a Section 337 complaint with the US International Trade Commission alleging that Nexxbase’s Luna Ring, along with rings from Samsung, Reebok and Zepp Health, infringed its patents; Nexxbase has since agreed to a Consent Order under which it will not import or sell the Luna Ring in the United States for the life of the asserted patents, according to Oura’s own account of the case and reporting by Wareable and the USITC. Separately, Whoop has sued Nexxbase over the trade dress of the screenless Noise Luna Band, per Wareable. Both disputes fall on exactly the new product categories Noise needs to succeed in if smartwatches keep shrinking.

The third is margin fragility. With EBITDA margins under 2% in both FY24 and FY25 and marketing spend running into hundreds of crores a year just to hold shelf space against near-identical Chinese-origin rivals, Noise has very little buffer: FY24 shows how quickly a flat-revenue year can turn into a loss once employee and marketing costs move even modestly higher.

The takeaway

Being the volume leader in a category is not the same as controlling that category’s economics. Noise out-marketed and out-priced global giants to become India’s best-selling smartwatch brand, but its own filings show that leadership sitting on top of an EBITDA margin under 2% — thin enough that a single deferred tax entry is the difference between a headline profit and a second straight year of losses. The lesson travels beyond wearables: market share built on price and marketing spend, in a category anyone can enter with the same Chinese supply chain everyone else uses, buys volume, not pricing power — and chasing that same playbook into adjacent categories, as Noise now is with rings and bands, imports the same commoditization risk one product line later, patent disputes included.

Frequently asked questions

Who owns Noise?

Noise is the consumer brand of Nexxbase Marketing Private Limited, founded and majority-owned by cousins Gaurav Khatri and Amit Khatri. Bose Corporation is the company’s only disclosed outside investor, holding a minority stake built across two rounds — December 2023 and April 2025 — reported to total around $30 million.

Is Noise profitable?

It has been inconsistent. Noise posted a net loss of Rs 20 crore in FY24 (year ended March 2024) and a net profit of Rs 3.2 crore in FY25, though the FY25 profit was aided by a Rs 47 crore deferred tax gain, per Entrackr’s reporting on the company’s Registrar of Companies filings.

What is Noise’s market share in smartwatches?

Counterpoint Research put Noise’s India smartwatch share at 27.6% for full-year 2024 and 30.9% in Q2 2025, while IDC separately recorded a 27.4% share for Noise in Q3 2024 — two independent trackers placing it at the top of the category through that period. In the broader “wearables” category, which also includes audio devices, IDC’s Q2 2026 data instead placed boAt first and Noise third.

Has Bose invested in Noise?

Yes. Bose Corporation invested close to $10 million in December 2023 and a further $20 million (about Rs 172 crore) in April 2025, taking Noise’s reported valuation to around $470 million. The two companies also have a commercial arrangement under which Nexxbase distributes Bose products online in India.

Is Noise planning an IPO?

No IPO has been announced or confirmed in public reporting as of September 2026. Noise remains a privately held company, backed by its founders and Bose Corporation.

Sources

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

• Entrackr, “Noise posts Rs 1,431 Cr revenue in FY24, remains EBITDA positive” — November 2024
• Entrackr, “Bose-funded Noise revenue declines 24% to Rs 1,048 Cr in FY25” — 2025
• Entrackr, “Noise bootstrapped its way to Rs 800 Cr revenue in FY22” — January 2023
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: Bose doubles down on Noise with $20 Mn investment” — 2025
• DTNext / Social News XYZ, “Wearable brand Noise’s profit plunges over 97% to just Rs 1 cr in FY23” — November 2023
• YourStory, “Wearable brand Noise reports 126% growth in revenue” — January 2023
• YourStory, “Global consumer electronics firm Bose acquires minority stake” — December 2023
• BW Disrupt, “Noise Hits $400mn Valuation After Series A Boost From Bose” — 2023
• BW Disrupt, “Bose-Backed Noise Sees FY25 Revenue Fall 24% To Rs 1,048 Cr, Posts Marginal Profit” — 2025
• Business Standard, “India’s Noise among top 3 global smartwatch brands in Q2 FY23: Counterpoint” — August 2023
• Counterpoint Research, “India Smartwatch Shipments Fall 27% YoY in Q2 2025, Fifth Successive Quarter of Declines” — 2025
• IDC (via Fonearena), “Indian wearables market declines 20.7%, Noise leads in smartwatches in Q3 2024” — 2024
• TelecomLead, “India Wearables Market Falls 7.4% to 24.7 Million Units in Q2 2026 as Premium Smartwatches, AI Earwear Gain Ground” — 2026
• Storyboard18, “From selling phone covers to Rs 2,000 crore in revenues: Journey of Gaurav and Amit Khatri’s Noise” — undated
• The Better India, “Making Noise: Selling Mobile Covers to Building Smartwatch Brand” — undated
• Wareable, “Whoop files lawsuit against Noise over the screenless Luna Band” — 2026
• Oura / USITC, “USITC Institutes Section 337 Investigation of Certain Smart Wearable Devices, Systems, and Components Thereof” — December 2025
• Revelio Labs, “Nexxbase Marketing Number of Employees” — 2026

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