Startup Deep Dive : Open Secret — claims ebitda profit while its books show a net loss

In July 2026, Open Secret told the press it had reached EBITDA profitability. The Registrar of Companies had a more recent, less flattering number on file for the same company: for the fiscal year ended March 2025, the Mumbai healthy-snacks maker booked a net loss of ₹7.1 crore on revenue of ₹87.25 crore ($9.1 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0, 18 September 2026), as per its RoC filing reported by Startuppedia in March 2026.

Both things can be true at once — operating profit and net loss sit on different lines of the same statement — and Open Secret’s own numbers show the gap closing fast: the cost of earning one rupee of revenue fell from ₹1.48 in FY24 to ₹1.09 in FY25. Founder Ahana Gautam, an IIT Bombay engineer with a Harvard MBA, started the company in March 2019 with ₹2 lakh borrowed from her mother. Seven years, four funding rounds and one personal tragedy later, she is chasing ₹1,000 crore in annual recurring revenue on a base that, by the company’s own account, has just crossed ₹200 crore.

Quick facts

What they do

Open Secret is a Mumbai-based direct-to-consumer food company operating under the legal entity Immaculatebites Private Limited, incorporated on 11 March 2019 (per Tofler). It makes packaged snacks formulated without refined sugar, refined flour, trans fats or palm oil — cookies, baked chips, namkeen, protein powders, breakfast cereals, and dry fruits and nuts — spread across more than 30 stock-keeping units (per Inc42, The Better India). The core buyer is a health-conscious parent shopping for a child’s tiffin box, though the company has widened its pitch to any adult looking to swap a conventional biscuit or chips packet for a “better-for-you” one. It sells through its own website, ecommerce marketplaces (Amazon, Flipkart), quick commerce (Blinkit, Zepto), and, as of July 2026, more than 500 physical retail outlets via modern and general trade (per Inc42, July 2026).

The origin

Ahana Gautam studied at IIT Bombay before an MBA at Harvard Business School (2014–2016, per DNA India), then spent close to four years at Procter & Gamble in product supply, followed by a stint at General Mills as a brand manager — the P&G years are also where she met her eventual co-founder and now chief operating officer, Udit Kejriwal (per Tracxn; corroborated by Startuppedia). Two things pulled her back to India. At Harvard, she noticed how much her own diet — and energy — changed on a US grocery aisle stocked with “better-for-you” snacks that had no real Indian equivalent. Closer to home, her sister-in-law struggled to find a packaged snack safe for a daughter diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at fifteen months old (per The Better India). Gautam turned down the next conventional rung of a corporate career and, in March 2019, put up Immaculatebites Private Limited with ₹2 lakh in paid-up capital provided by her mother, Raj Laxmi Gautam, who became a director in the company (per Forbes India, The Better India). The idea, in her own framing, was to “un-junk” the Indian snack aisle rather than simply compete with it on taste.

The struggle years

The company spent close to nine months and tested more than 1,000 cookie-recipe iterations, using a panel of 100 mothers it called its “Chief Innovation Officers,” before it settled on a formula low enough in sugar and still palatable to children (per The Better India). By January 2020 there was still no manufacturing benchmark to copy — better-for-you baking at scale barely existed in India at the time — so the team built its own assembly line from first principles. Commercial operations began around March 2020, just as the country entered its first COVID-19 lockdown. Weeks later, the factory’s refrigeration failed mid-lockdown; with logistics frozen and stock at risk, Gautam brought her own home refrigerator to the plant rather than lose the batch (per The Better India). The improvisation held — the company went on to sell more than 10 lakh cookies through the pandemic’s first year, largely online, as homebound parents shopped for tiffin-box alternatives.

The turning point

The sharpest before-and-after in Open Secret’s history sits in the middle of 2021. During India’s brutal second COVID-19 wave, Gautam’s mother — the same Raj Laxmi Gautam who had put up the company’s first ₹2 lakh and sat on its board — died. Gautam has described it in public interviews as “the lowest moment of my life” (per Forbes India), a description she also carried onto her own social media in a post mourning her mother around the same period. By her own account, she went into a funding negotiation the very next day rather than pause it, and Open Secret closed its Series A round that July (per Forbes India; the round is separately dated to 21 July 2021 by Tracxn and by siliconindia’s contemporaneous report). On one side of that turning point sat a company running on 2019 seed capital and, by the founder’s own account, tenfold revenue growth in the preceding year, but with no institutional lead investor (per siliconindia). On the other side sat a round led by Sixth Sense Ventures, with existing backer Matrix Partners India also participating, plus a roster of angel investors — Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Snapdeal co-founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, and boAt chief executive Vivek Gambhir — that gave the brand both capital and a consumer-internet credibility it did not have on its own (per siliconindia).

The money behind it

Open Secret has raised money in stages since 2019, moving from founder-family capital to a specialist consumer-focused venture book to, most recently, a strategic FMCG conglomerate:

• Seed, 2019: pre-institutional capital, including the founder’s mother’s ₹2 lakh paid-up capital; Tracxn separately records a seed round dated 14 June 2019. Amount undisclosed.
• Series A, 21 July 2021: led by Sixth Sense Ventures, with Matrix Partners India and angel investors Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Kunal Bahl, Rohit Bansal and Vivek Gambhir participating (per siliconindia). Amount undisclosed.
• Series B, 28 June 2022: led by Ananta Capital, with existing investors Sixth Sense Ventures and Matrix Partners India, plus angel investor Gautam Kumra of McKinsey & Company (per YourStory, June 2022). Amount undisclosed.
• Latest round, 15 July 2026: more than ₹50 crore ($5.2 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0), comprising ₹30 crore in primary equity from Desai Brothers Group — a diversified, 120-year-old conglomerate with food, tobacco and hospitality interests — plus an institutional debt component (per Inc42, July 2026). Tracxn classifies this round as Series C.
• Total raised — trackers disagree: Tracxn puts cumulative funding at $17.5 million across 9 rounds from 26 investors, while Inc42’s company profile counts $15.18 million across 4 rounds; both list Sixth Sense Ventures, Matrix Partners India, Ananta Capital and Desai Brothers Group among the backers.
• Latest valuation: not disclosed in any source reviewed this session; Tracxn lists it as undisclosed as of March 2025, and none of the announcements around the July 2026 round stated a figure.

What each backer changed is visible in what came next: Sixth Sense Ventures and Matrix Partners India gave the brand its first institutional validation and a national-retail playbook at Series A; Ananta Capital’s Series B added growth capital as the company scaled distribution; and Desai Brothers Group’s 2026 cheque is explicitly a manufacturing-and-distribution partnership aimed at the harder, offline half of the business (per Inc42, July 2026).

How it makes money

Open Secret earns money the way most packaged-food D2C brands do: it manufactures snacks, prices them at a premium to conventional biscuits and chips, and sells across its own site and every large Indian retail channel, keeping the spread between input-plus-logistics cost and shelf price. Its FY25 Registrar of Companies filing, reported by Startuppedia in March 2026, shows where that spread is coming from and where it is still being spent:

• Revenue, FY25: ₹85.5 crore of product sales plus ₹1.75 crore of other income, for total revenue of ₹87.25 crore — up 62% from ₹54 crore in FY24.
• Cost of goods sold, FY25: ₹42.8 crore, up 55% from ₹27.6 crore in FY24 — dry fruits, nuts and packaging rose in step with volume.
• Marketing spend, FY25: ₹29 crore, up 42% from ₹20.5 crore in FY24 — still the largest controllable cost line after COGS, reflecting a challenger D2C brand’s dependence on paid acquisition.
• Employee benefit expense, FY25: ₹6 crore, down from ₹10.2 crore in FY24 — the one major cost line that fell even as revenue grew, per the same filing.
• Cost to earn ₹1 of revenue: ₹1.09 in FY25, down from ₹1.48 in FY24 — the metric investors are understood to watch most closely on the path to the profitability the company said it had reached, on an EBITDA basis, in its July 2026 funding announcement.

The part outsiders usually get wrong is assuming “healthy” carries a fatter margin than ordinary snacking. It does not — better ingredients cost more, not less — so the entire business case rests on charging enough of a premium, and selling enough volume through owned and quick-commerce channels, to cover that extra input cost and still fund the marketing a challenger brand needs against established biscuit and chips majors.

The numbers

Public trackers reviewed this session only carry audited figures back to FY24 for Immaculatebites Private Limited; FY22 and FY23 filings were not found in any source opened this session, so they are left out rather than estimated.

(Figures per RoC filing, reported by Startuppedia, March 2026.) A third, more recent number sits outside this table: in its July 2026 fundraise announcement, Open Secret said it had crossed ₹200 crore in annualised recurring revenue (ARR), growing at roughly 10% month-on-month (per Inc42 and YourStory, both July 2026). ARR is a run-rate, not an audited annual figure, and is not directly comparable to the FY24/FY25 rows above — but the gap between an audited ₹87.25 crore in FY25 and a company-stated run-rate of more than ₹200 crore a little over a year later gives a sense of how fast the underlying business says it is moving.

Where the money comes from

Open Secret has not published a formal revenue-by-channel or revenue-by-product breakup in any filing found this session, but its own funding announcements describe the shape of the business:

• Channel mix: sales flow through its own D2C website, ecommerce marketplaces (Amazon, Flipkart), quick commerce (Blinkit, Zepto), and more than 500 offline retail outlets via modern and general trade, as of July 2026 (per Inc42).
• Product mix: the founding hero category — no-refined-sugar cookies — has been joined by baked chips, namkeen, protein powders, cereals, dry fruits and nuts, and gift hampers, across more than 30 SKUs (per Inc42, The Better India).
• Fastest-growing segment: chips and namkeen — everyday savoury snacking reformulated to the brand’s health rules — are growing faster than the founding cookies line, as the company chases daily snacking occasions rather than only the tiffin-box moment (per Inc42, July 2026).
• Where the new capital is aimed: the July 2026 round was earmarked for the harder, more capital-intensive shift from an online-first business to physical retail, plus AI-led supply chain tools (per Inc42, YourStory, July 2026).

The surprising part is the direction of travel: most Indian D2C food brands built around a cookies-and-biscuits identity try to defend that base; Open Secret is instead pushing hardest into the more commoditised, lower-differentiation chips-and-namkeen shelf, betting that a health claim travels further in a category people already buy in high volume.

The risks

• Persistent input-cost pressure on margin: cost of goods sold rose 55% in FY25 against 62% revenue growth, and clean-label inputs such as dry fruits and nuts are commodity-priced and harder to substitute down than the sugar, refined flour and palm oil the brand markets itself as avoiding (per RoC filing, via Startuppedia, March 2026).
• Category crowding: Open Secret competes directly with The Whole Truth, Yoga Bar, Slurrp Farm, Snackible, Wellbeing Nutrition, TagZ Foods and Happilo for the same health-conscious shelf and search terms, in a segment where a product that leans too “healthy” loses on taste and one that leans too “tasty” loses its reason to exist — a balance Inc42’s coverage of the category flags as the central execution risk (per Inc42, July 2026).
• Execution risk in the offline pivot: the next leg of growth depends on physical distribution — more than 500 outlets already, with more planned via modern and general trade — a channel with slower cash cycles, trade margins and spoilage risk that a primarily online-first team has limited history of managing at this scale (per Inc42, July 2026 funding announcement).

The takeaway

The lesson in Open Secret’s numbers is not that conviction wins — plenty of founders have kept working through worse and still failed. It is that the founder tracked the right number all along. Revenue growth of 62% in FY25 would mean little on its own; what actually changed the company’s trajectory was that the cost of earning that revenue fell from ₹1.48 to ₹1.09 in the same year, a metric no press release leads with but every investor eventually asks for. For a founder building a premium consumer brand against cheaper incumbents, the transferable point is narrow and useful: growth and a good story buy time, but the number that decides whether that time was worth anything is the cost of the rupee you just earned, not the one you plan to earn next year.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded Open Secret and when?

Ahana Gautam founded Open Secret in March 2019 under the legal entity Immaculatebites Private Limited, incorporated on 11 March 2019 (per Tofler). Udit Kejriwal, a former Procter & Gamble colleague, is its co-founder and chief operating officer (per Tracxn).

How much funding has Open Secret raised?

Trackers disagree on the exact total: Tracxn counts $17.5 million across 9 rounds from 26 investors, while Inc42 counts $15.18 million across 4 rounds. Both agree on the broad shape of the journey — a 2019 seed round, a Series A led by Sixth Sense Ventures (21 July 2021), a Series B led by Ananta Capital (28 June 2022), and a more-than-₹50-crore round led by Desai Brothers Group (15 July 2026).

Is Open Secret profitable?

Not on a net basis as of its most recent audited year: it reported a net loss of about ₹7.1 crore on revenue of ₹87.25 crore for FY25 (per RoC filing, via Startuppedia), though that loss narrowed 72% from about ₹25 crore in FY24. Separately, in its July 2026 funding announcement, the company said it had achieved EBITDA profitability.

What does Open Secret sell?

Packaged snacks made without refined sugar, refined flour, trans fats or palm oil — cookies, baked chips, namkeen, protein powders, cereals, and dry fruits and nuts — across more than 30 SKUs, sold via its own website, ecommerce, quick commerce and, increasingly, offline retail (per Inc42).

What is Open Secret’s valuation?

Not disclosed in any source found this session. Tracxn lists the company’s latest valuation as undisclosed as of March 2025, and none of the announcements around the July 2026 funding round stated a figure.

Sources

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

• Inc42, “Healthy Snacking Brand Open Secret Raises ₹50 Cr To Scale Offline Presence,” July 2026
• Inc42, company profile and financials pages for Open Secret, accessed September 2026
• YourStory, “Healthy snacks brand Open Secret raises over Rs 50 Cr funding,” July 2026
• YourStory (HerStory), coverage of Open Secret’s Series B funding, June 2022
• Tracxn, Open Secret company profile, accessed September 2026
• siliconindia, “Snack Startup Open Secret raises Series A funding led by Sixth Sense Ventures,” 2021
• Forbes India, “Ahana Gautam’s Open Secret: Be unapologetic and fight for your dream”
• The Better India, “IIT Grad ‘Unjunks’ Snacks to Build a Healthy Food Business With Rs 100 Crore Turnover,” February 2024
• Startuppedia, “IIT Alumni & Former P&G Colleagues Scale Healthy Snack Brand Open Secret to Rs 87 Cr Revenue in FY25; Losses Shrink to Rs 7 Cr,” March 2026 (citing RoC filing)
• Tofler, company financial record for Immaculatebites Private Limited (CIN U15400MH2019PTC322351)
• D2C Insider Pulse, “Open Secret Raises ₹50 Crore to Accelerate Offline Expansion and Healthy Snacking Growth,” July 2026
• Indian Retailer, “Funding Alert: Open Secret Raises Over Rs 50 Cr to Expand Healthy Snacking Business,” July 2026
• DNA India, profile of Ahana Gautam’s education and career background, 2025

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