Startup Deep Dive : OZiva — HUL bought full control of a brand that still hasn’t turned a profit

In February 2026, Hindustan Unilever paid ₹824 crore (~$175 million total company valuation, at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) for the 49% of OZiva it did not already own, taking full control of a plant-based nutrition brand that has never once closed a fiscal year in profit on an operating basis. The contradiction is sharper than it looks: HUL had already placed this exact bet once before, in December 2022, and the year that followed was OZiva’s worst on record, with revenue falling and losses widening before a very deliberate turnaround brought the company back.

OZiva today sells plant-based protein, vitamins and hair, skin and women’s health supplements through its own website and marketplaces such as Amazon, Flipkart and Nykaa. It is now a wholly owned subsidiary of one of India’s largest consumer goods companies, valued at roughly ₹1,682 crore, up from ₹518 crore at HUL’s first entry just over three years earlier. What happened in between — a founder pivot, an advertising binge, a cost-cutting correction and a slow crawl toward breakeven — is the real story.

Quick facts

What they do

OZiva makes and sells plant-based nutrition products aimed at people who want clean-label alternatives to conventional supplements — lifestyle protein powders, multivitamins, and hair, skin and women’s health formulations built around herbal and botanical ingredients rather than synthetic additives. Its customers are largely urban, digitally native Indians who discover the brand on Instagram or a marketplace search rather than in a pharmacy aisle, and it competes less on price than on positioning: no added sugar, no artificial preservatives, ingredients that read more like a kitchen list than a lab report.

The origin

Aarti Gill and Mihir Gadani did not start with OZiva. Their first venture together, a fitness-and-nutrition app called Fit Circle launched around 2014, offered online boot camps, diet consultations and expert Q&A — and it did not find a market. Gill has since recounted the low point candidly: a teary phone call home, and a decision the next morning to try again rather than fold. What they tried next was narrower and more specific than a fitness app: a supplements brand built entirely around plant-based, clean-label formulations, at a time when the Indian market for wellness products was still dominated by whey protein and synthetic multivitamins imported or copied from Western brands. Gill’s own conviction was personal — she has spoken about growing up around a nutrition-conscious household and studying the science of ingredients before turning it into a product line. Gadani brought the operating and analytical discipline. Together they founded Zywie Ventures in 2016, launching under the OZiva brand with roughly ₹20 lakh in debt and little else (YourStory, businesstoday.in reporting).

The struggle years

The failure of Fit Circle is the first documented near-death: a consumer app business that consumed the founders’ time and money without building a defensible product, and that forced a hard pivot into a category — supplements — where OZiva could own a specific, ownable claim (clean, plant-based) rather than compete as one more fitness app among hundreds. That pivot bought OZiva several years of quiet, venture-funded growth, but the second and more consequential struggle came after it looked most successful. By FY22, OZiva was running at roughly ₹123.5 crore in revenue but had also spent close to ₹100 crore on advertising and promotion that year alone — a growth-at-any-cost approach common to venture-backed D2C brands chasing scale ahead of HUL’s investment. That spending did not translate into durable growth: in FY23, revenue fell to around ₹100 crore, a contraction of roughly 19–20% year-on-year even as the company was, on paper, a majority HUL subsidiary by December 2022 (thebusinessrule.com, citing MCA filings). It is a blunt lesson in what unwinding an advertising-led growth model looks like in the numbers: revenue that had been manufactured by ad spend evaporated once that spend was pulled back.

The turning point

The turning point was not a single funding round or product launch — it was HUL’s December 2022 decision to buy 51% of Zywie Ventures for ₹264.28 crore, implying a company valuation of about ₹518 crore, and the cost discipline that followed. Before the deal, OZiva’s advertising and promotion spend alone was close to ₹100 crore against ₹123.5 crore of FY22 revenue — a business burning through cash to keep growth numbers moving. After the deal, HUL’s management pulled that lever hard: advertising and promotion spend fell to about ₹38.3 crore in FY23, a cut of roughly 62%, even as total expenses dropped from about ₹190 crore to ₹145 crore. Revenue dipped in the short run as a result, but the trajectory that followed tells the rest of the story: by FY25, revenue had climbed to ₹257.67 crore — more than double FY24’s ₹103.72 crore — while the net loss narrowed to just ₹4.5 crore, down 90% from ₹43.5 crore the year before. The numbers on either side of the 2022 deal are the clearest evidence of what changed: a company spending roughly ₹1 to earn less than ₹1 in revenue became one spending ₹1.04 to earn ₹1, a much smaller gap, achieved by reining in the one line item — advertising — that had been driving both growth and the losses.

The money behind it

• Angel and early backing (from around 2015): Titan Capital was an early institutional backer and stayed on through subsequent rounds.
• Series A — June 2020: ~$5 million led by Matrix Partners India, with participation from existing investor Titan Capital, at a time OZiva was running at an annualised revenue rate of about ₹100 crore and targeting ₹200 crore by March 2021 (businesstoday.in, August 2020).
• Series B — March 2021: $12 million led by Eight Roads Ventures (via its ERVI vehicle) and F-Prime Capital, with Matrix Partners India participating again; Eight Roads framed the bet as backing “India’s leading digital-first consumer health company” (Eight Roads press release, March 2021).
• Venture debt — around January 2022: Additional debt financing from Stride Ventures, used to fund working capital and inventory ahead of the HUL transaction.
• Total raised pre-HUL: approximately $17 million (~₹140 crore at contemporary exchange rates) across institutional rounds, per Inc42’s financial database.
• HUL, tranche one — December 2022: ₹264.28 crore for a 51% stake, implying a company valuation of ~₹518 crore.
• HUL, tranche two — 13 February 2026: ₹824 crore for the remaining 49%, implying a company valuation of ~₹1,682 crore (~$175 million) — more than three times the 2022 figure in a little over three years.

Each backer changed something specific: Titan Capital and Matrix Partners India provided the early conviction capital that took OZiva from a founder-funded idea to a venture-scale brand; Eight Roads and F-Prime Capital’s Series B financed the marketing push that built OZiva’s digital-first brand recognition (and, as the struggle-years numbers show, also financed the overspend that had to be corrected); and HUL’s two-stage acquisition replaced venture capital’s growth-at-scale mandate with a parent company’s mandate for a sustainable, profitable unit inside a much larger portfolio.

How it makes money

OZiva sells physical, repeat-purchase consumer products — protein powders, tablets, gummies and topical formulations — directly to consumers online and through e-commerce marketplaces, earning revenue on every unit sold rather than through a subscription or platform-fee model.

• Revenue: product sales, with international gloss aside, 99% of FY25 revenue came from nutrition and wellness products and the entirety came from India — there is no material export or non-core revenue line (Entrackr Fintrackr analysis, FY25 filings).
• Distribution mix (as of 2020, the last publicly detailed split): roughly 50% of orders through OZiva’s own website, and the remaining 50% split across Amazon, Flipkart and Nykaa (businesstoday.in, August 2020); the channel mix has likely shifted since, but no more recent breakdown is publicly disclosed.
• Largest cost line — advertising and promotion: ₹120 crore in FY25 (up 94% year-on-year), representing roughly 46% of that year’s revenue — still the single biggest lever in the P&L, even after the FY23 correction.
• Cost of materials consumed: ₹71 crore in FY25 (up 58% year-on-year), broadly tracking volume growth.
• Employee benefit expense: ₹23 crore in FY25 (up 44% year-on-year).
• Transportation and logistics: ₹24 crore in FY25, more than doubling year-on-year as order volumes scaled.
• The part people get wrong: a “clean label” premium brand is often assumed to carry high gross margins; the FY25 numbers show a company still spending ₹1.04 to earn ₹1 of revenue overall (Entrackr, unit-economics disclosure) — the margin has improved sharply from FY24 but the business is not yet comfortably profitable on its own economics, which is a large part of why full ownership, and access to HUL’s distribution and manufacturing scale, mattered more than another funding round would have.

The numbers

Figures below are revenue from operations and net profit/loss, in ₹ crore, as reported from Registrar of Companies filings by financial media.

A separate, higher figure appears in HUL’s own acquisition commentary: it describes OZiva as having “scaled to approximately ₹480 crore” in 2025 revenue at a roughly 130% two-year CAGR (Entrackr’s acquisition-news report and Nutraingredients, both February 2026). That number is markedly higher than the ₹257.67 crore RoC-filed figure for FY25 above, and neither report specified whether it reflects a calendar-year rather than fiscal-year period, gross sales rather than net revenue, or a forward run-rate. Where the two conflict, this piece treats the audited FY25 filing (₹257.67 crore) as the more reliable number and flags HUL’s ₹480 crore figure as company-stated and unreconciled.

Where the money comes from

• By product category: nutrition and wellness products (plant-based protein, vitamins, minerals and supplements) made up 99% of FY25 revenue; the remainder is negligible (Entrackr Fintrackr, FY25 filings).
• By geography: 100% of FY25 revenue was generated in India — there is no disclosed export revenue.
• By channel (last disclosed split, 2020): approximately 50% direct via OZiva’s own website, 50% via Amazon, Flipkart and Nykaa combined.
• The surprise: for a brand often cited as a poster child of India’s digital-first D2C wave, OZiva’s revenue base is strikingly undiversified — a single country, and a single product super-category (VMS and plant-based nutrition) account for essentially all of its sales, with no meaningful international or adjacent-category cushion if domestic demand for supplements were to soften.

The risks

• Advertising dependency: ₹120 crore of FY25’s ₹257.67 crore revenue (about 46%) was spent on advertising and promotion, up 94% year-on-year against 148% revenue growth — a ratio that improved but remains a structural dependency; any pullback in ad spend has historically hit revenue directly, as the FY23 contraction showed.
• Category and geography concentration: 99% of FY25 revenue came from nutrition and wellness products and 100% from India (Entrackr Fintrackr, FY25 filings), leaving the business exposed to any slowdown in Indian consumer demand for supplements, with no export or adjacent-category buffer.
• Thin unit economics even after the correction: FY25 EBITDA margin was -1.21% and return on capital employed was -7.50% (Entrackr Fintrackr analysis); despite cutting losses by 90% year-on-year, OZiva was still not operating-profit positive when HUL agreed to buy out the remaining 49% for ₹824 crore, meaning the acquisition price rests on a growth and margin trajectory rather than current earnings.

The takeaway

OZiva’s arc is a reminder that a growth chart and a health chart are not the same thing. The company was, by revenue, a bigger business in FY22 relative to its ad spend than it looked healthy — ₹123.5 crore of revenue propped up by close to ₹100 crore of advertising is not the same achievement as ₹257.67 crore of revenue built on a ₹120 crore ad budget with losses cut to ₹4.5 crore. The lesson that travels beyond one supplements brand is that revenue bought with marketing spend is a rented number, not an owned one, and the true test of a consumer brand’s health is what happens to sales when the spending is turned down, not up.

Frequently asked questions

What does OZiva sell?

OZiva sells plant-based nutrition products, including protein powders, vitamins and supplements, and hair, skin and women’s health formulations, positioned around clean-label, additive-free ingredients.

Who founded OZiva, and when?

Aarti Gill and Mihir Gadani founded OZiva (legally Zywie Ventures Private Limited) in 2016, after their earlier fitness app venture, Fit Circle, did not succeed.

When did Hindustan Unilever acquire OZiva, and for how much?

HUL first acquired a 51% stake in December 2022 for ₹264.28 crore, valuing the company at about ₹518 crore. It bought the remaining 49% on 13 February 2026 for ₹824 crore, valuing OZiva at approximately ₹1,682 crore (~$175 million) and making it a wholly owned subsidiary.

Is OZiva profitable?

Not yet on a full-year basis. OZiva narrowed its net loss to ₹4.5 crore in FY25 (year ended March 2025), down 90% from a ₹43.5 crore loss in FY24, on revenue of ₹257.67 crore. It reported a headline net profit in FY23 only because of a one-time ₹95.5 crore other-income gain; excluding that, it posted an underlying loss that year too.

How has OZiva’s revenue grown over the past few years?

Revenue from operations was around ₹100 crore in FY23, ₹103.72 crore in FY24, and ₹257.67 crore in FY25 — a jump of roughly 148% in the most recent year, per Registrar of Companies filings reported by Entrackr.

Sources

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

• Entrackr, “Hindustan Unilever acquires remaining 49% stake in OZiva for Rs 824 Cr” — February 2026
• Entrackr (Fintrackr), “Oziva revenue grows 2.5X in FY25; cuts losses by 90%” — 2026
• Inc42, OZiva company financials database — 2026
• Inc42, “HUL Completes Acquisition Of Remaining 49% Stake In OZiva For ₹824 Cr” — February 2026
• Storyboard18, “HUL acquires remaining 49% stake in OZiva for Rs 824 crore; divests 19.8% in Nutritionalab” — February 2026
• Nutraingredients, “Hindustan Unilever to fully acquire OZiva for US$90m” — 16 February 2026
• The Business Rule, “Oziva Revenue & Losses Both Drop By Rs 20 Cr in FY23” — 2023/2024 reporting period
• Business Today, “Nutrition brand Oziva to focus on women’s health products” — 29 August 2020
• Eight Roads, “ERVI invests in plant-based nutrition brand, OZiva” — March 2021
• BusinessConnect India, “The Couple Behind OZiva: Aarti Gill & Mihir Gadani’s Clean Nutrition Revolution” — 2026
• YourStory, founder interviews and Matrix Moments podcast coverage of OZiva’s founding and early pivot — 2019/2021

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