Startup Deep Dive : Roposo — the company behind it now books almost no revenue

In FY24, the company legally called Roposo reported revenue of ₹8.1 lakh. Not crore — lakh, a rounding error next to a proper business. In the same twelve months, the live-commerce operation that carries the Roposo name and app-store listing did ₹254 crore ($26.5 million) in revenue, according to Entrackr’s reading of its parent’s filings — just it was booked inside a different company altogether.

That split is not an accounting curiosity. It is the whole story of what happened to Roposo after it stopped being an independent startup: a short-video app that once added 22 million users in two days when TikTok was banned, bought by an ad-tech conglomerate’s content arm, folded into a live-shopping bet, and left to exist on paper as a near-empty shell while the real business runs on someone else’s balance sheet.

Quick facts

What they do

Roposo is a short-video app and, since 2021, a live-shopping marketplace layered on top of it: verified sellers and creators go live inside the app, walk viewers through a product, and let them buy without leaving the stream. It sits inside Glance, the AI-driven lock-screen content platform that ships pre-installed on Android phones across India and several other markets, which is itself a subsidiary of the Bengaluru-headquartered ad-tech group InMobi. Roposo’s own newsroom material describes it as India’s largest “trends-first” live platform, citing over 80 million monthly active users, 500-plus livestreamers and more than 100 live shows a day as of late 2023 (Glance press release, October 2023; SME Street, 2024) — figures that are company-stated rather than independently audited, and are presented here as such. Buyers skew towards value fashion, beauty and home categories, sold by a mix of brands and small third-party sellers rather than Roposo itself holding inventory.

The origin

Roposo began in July 2014 as a fashion-discovery app, built by three IIT Delhi graduates — Mayank Bhangadia, Avinash Saxena and Kaushal Shubhank — under a company called Relevant E-Solutions Private Limited. The founding insight was simple: Instagram and Pinterest were full of outfit photos, but nothing in India let ordinary users turn “what I’m wearing” into a shoppable, discoverable feed built around local trends and regional languages rather than global fashion influencers. Bhangadia had trained as an engineer at IIT Delhi before moving into consulting and finance; the trio raised early institutional backing from Tiger Global within a year of launch (TechCrunch, 2015), a fast start that, on its own, told them little about what the product would eventually have to become. By 2016 the company had drawn roughly $21 million in total funding and reached a peak valuation of about ₹487 crore, according to Entrackr’s later reporting — a number that would matter more for how far the company fell than for what it built next.

The struggle years

The fashion-app idea did not hold. Between 2015 and 2018, Roposo raised no fresh capital at all, Entrackr reported in October 2018 — a three-year funding drought for a company that had looked, in 2016, like it was headed somewhere fast. Revenue was thin: ₹1.29 crore in FY17, against a loss of ₹30.96 crore the same year. Somewhere in that stretch, Bhangadia and his co-founders made the pivot that would define the company: in August 2017, Roposo repositioned itself away from fashion discovery and towards short-form video, briefly styling itself “TV By The People” and adding content across roughly 25 channels — comedy, spirituality, regional-language shows, dubbed videos — in ten Indian languages (TechCrunch, December 2018).

The pivot bought time rather than comfort. FY18 revenue tripled to ₹3.84 crore, and the loss narrowed to ₹20.57 crore (Entrackr, October 2018) — real progress, but still a company burning capital it had not been able to replace since 2015. The valuation told the harsher version of that story: when Tiger Global and Bertelsmann India Investments finally returned with a $10 million extended Series C in December 2018, Entrackr reported the round valued Roposo at ₹288 crore — roughly 40% below its 2016 peak. A further $5 million tranche from Tiger Global followed in May 2019, taking total disclosed funding past $32 million across five rounds, but the company was, by its own investors’ pricing, worth less than it had been three years earlier.

The turning point

The turning point did not come from a product decision. On 29 June 2020, India banned 59 Chinese-linked apps, including TikTok, in the aftermath of a deadly border clash with China. TikTok had roughly 200 million users in India at the time; Roposo, pre-ban, had about 50 million Android installs. In the two days after the ban, Roposo added 22 million new users, and its total Android downloads crossed 80 million, according to reporting by the South China Morning Post — a surge separately described at the time as roughly 500,000 new users an hour (Exchange4media, June 2020). It was, by a wide margin, the single largest jump in Roposo’s user base in its six-year history, and it arrived from a geopolitical event the company had no part in creating.

The surge did not translate into a durable independent business, however — by the time it happened, Roposo was already five months into life as someone else’s subsidiary. On 25 November 2019, Glance, then the content platform of InMobi Group, had acquired Roposo for an undisclosed sum, gaining its brand, video technology and a user base Inc42 put at more than 42 million at the time. The TikTok-ban windfall of mid-2020, in other words, landed inside Glance’s app, not inside an independent Roposo racing to defend its own cap table.

The money behind it

• Tiger Global — the earliest and most persistent backer, leading Roposo’s roughly $5 million Series A around 2015 (TechCrunch) and returning for later rounds through the December 2018 extended Series C and the May 2019 Series D tranche (Entrackr).
• Bertelsmann India Investments — co-led the December 2018 $10 million round alongside Tiger Global, having backed the company in earlier rounds too (TechCrunch, December 2018).
• India Quotient — an early-stage backer named among Roposo’s investors in Entrackr’s FY18 financial reporting (October 2018).
• Total raised before acquisition: reported at $37.7 million (Inc42) to $38.2 million (Crunchbase, via aggregated reporting) across roughly nine rounds between 2015 and 2019.
• The exit: Glance (InMobi Group) acquired Roposo on 25 November 2019 for an undisclosed amount (Inc42; YourStory, both November 2019).
• What changed after: Roposo stopped raising its own capital. Its new parent, Glance, went on to raise $45 million from Mithril Capital (September 2019), $145 million from Google and Mithril (crossing a $1.2 billion valuation and unicorn status in late 2020, per Wikipedia/VentureBeat), and $200 million from Reliance’s Jio Platforms in February 2022 at a valuation reported around $1.6–1.7 billion, with Jio Platforms taking roughly a 20.27% stake (TechCrunch; Business Standard, February 2022; Businessworld).

How it makes money

Roposo’s current model is live-commerce: creators and brands run video streams inside the app that function like a pop-up shop, and a purchase happens without the buyer switching apps. Glance’s own commerce push began in earnest on 14 June 2021, when it acquired Shop101 — a reseller-driven social-commerce platform with roughly 10 million resellers and 10,000 supplier partners at the time (YourStory; Business Standard; PYMNTS) — in a cash-and-equity deal of undisclosed value, folding its merchant and fulfilment plumbing into what would become Roposo’s shopping layer. Roposo itself launched creator-led live shopping in October 2021 (YourStory; Inc42, both October 2021), scaling it through 2022 into the “shoppertainment” format it now markets internationally, including a launch in Indonesia in October 2023 with around 200 local creators (YourStory).

The part most outside observers get wrong is which company actually earns this money. Roposo the app and Roposo the registered company are no longer the same thing in any financial sense: Relevant E-Solutions Pvt Ltd, the original entity, reported revenue of just ₹8.1 lakh in FY24 against ₹8.5 crore in FY23 — a 99% collapse, per Inc42’s tracking of its filings — while the operating business runs through parent Glance Digital Experience Pvt Ltd, which books it as a “commerce (shoppertainment)” segment worth ₹254 crore in FY24 (Entrackr). Neither company discloses a take rate or transaction fee publicly, so the margin on each sale is not verifiable from public filings; what is verifiable is that the segment sits alongside, and is now nearly as large as, Glance’s separately reported advertising business.

The numbers

Roposo’s original entity no longer files numbers worth tabulating. The figures below are for parent Glance Digital Experience Pvt Ltd on a consolidated basis, as reported by Entrackr from its regulatory filings — the only place Roposo’s commerce contribution shows up in any audited form.

A caveat on FY23: Entrackr’s original report on that year (April 2024) had put revenue at ₹317 crore and the loss at ₹1,067 crore; its later FY24 coverage restated FY23 to ₹325 crore and ₹1,094 crore for like-for-like comparison. Both figures are Entrackr’s own, from two separate pieces — the table above uses the restated version.

FY24 costs, per the same reporting: employee benefits ₹444 crore (including ₹71.4 crore in non-cash ESOP charges), marketing and selling ₹436 crore, shipping ₹200 crore, and infrastructure ₹201 crore, against ₹1,569 crore in total expenses — a spend of roughly ₹2.55 for every ₹1 of revenue earned. FY22-era Roposo, by contrast, had once run its entire operation on a fraction of that: at its FY18 peak of independence, total expenses were ₹24.75 crore against ₹3.84 crore of revenue (Entrackr, October 2018) — smaller by two orders of magnitude, but proportionally almost as loss-making.

Where the money comes from

• Advertising: ₹336 crore in FY24, up 35.7% from ₹248 crore in FY23 — 54.7% of Glance’s reported operating revenue and its single largest segment (Entrackr).
• Commerce / shoppertainment (Roposo): ₹254 crore in FY24 — roughly 41% of operating revenue, and Glance’s fastest-scaling segment since the Shop101 acquisition in 2021 (Entrackr).
• Financial/interest income: ₹15.9 crore in FY24, a small supplementary line (Entrackr).
• Geography: India remains the core market for both Glance’s lock-screen content and Roposo’s live-commerce base; Roposo’s one disclosed market beyond India is Indonesia, launched October 2023 with roughly 200 local creators (YourStory) — no revenue split by country has been made public.

The surprise is less which segment is bigger and more how close the gap has closed. A live-shopping business that Glance only entered in 2021, largely through the bolt-on acquisition of Shop101, is now generating revenue within touching distance of an advertising business built over years around hundreds of millions of lock-screen impressions.

The risks

• Unproven standalone economics: because Roposo’s commerce revenue is reported only as a segment inside Glance, its profitability — or lack of it — is invisible in public filings; the wider Glance entity that houses it posted a ₹929 crore net loss in FY24, down only 15% from ₹1,094 crore in FY23 (Entrackr), on total expenses of ₹1,569 crore against ₹614 crore of revenue.
• A crowded live-commerce field with an unproven Indian scale: the format Roposo is betting on already accounts for roughly a fifth of e-commerce sales in China, and industry estimates have put India’s live-and-interactive commerce opportunity at more than $40 billion by 2025 (Exchange4media, quoting industry projections) — a forecast now largely due, against which Roposo has disclosed no GMV or transaction-volume figures to show how much of that opportunity it has actually captured.
• Early-stage, low-disclosure international expansion: Roposo’s push beyond India began with Indonesia in October 2023 at a reported 200 local creators (YourStory) — a modest base with no subsequent traction figures made public, leaving its international bet effectively unverifiable from outside the company.

The takeaway

The lesson in Roposo’s paperwork is not really about live commerce, or even about surviving a TikTok ban. It is about what “the company” means once an acquisition happens. Founders and acquirers often talk about buying a brand, a user base, a team — but the entity that actually earned those things can be left behind as an empty shell, filing near-zero numbers, while the substance of the business moves into someone else’s balance sheet under a segment label most people will never read. For anyone trying to judge whether a once-independent startup is thriving after being bought, the registered company’s own annual filing may be the least informative document available — the real answer, if it exists in public form at all, is usually buried a level up, inside the parent that swallowed it.

Frequently asked questions

Is Roposo still an independent company?

No. Since 25 November 2019, Roposo has been owned by Glance Digital Experience Pvt Ltd, part of the InMobi Group; the acquisition terms were not disclosed (Inc42; YourStory, November 2019).

What happened to the original company that built Roposo?

Relevant E-Solutions Pvt Ltd, the entity that built the app from 2014, still exists on paper but reported revenue of just ₹8.1 lakh in FY24, down from ₹8.5 crore in FY23 — a 99% decline (Inc42). The operating live-commerce business now runs through parent Glance instead.

How much funding did Roposo raise before being acquired?

Reports put it at $37.7–38.2 million across roughly nine rounds between 2015 and 2019, from investors including Tiger Global, Bertelsmann India Investments and India Quotient (Inc42; TechCrunch; Entrackr), before its November 2019 sale to Glance for an undisclosed sum.

How does Roposo make money today?

Mainly through its creator-led live-commerce marketplace, launched in October 2021 and reported as a “commerce (shoppertainment)” segment worth ₹254 crore in FY24 within parent Glance’s filings (Entrackr) — distinct from Glance’s larger advertising business.

Is Glance, Roposo’s parent, profitable?

No. Glance posted a consolidated net loss of ₹929 crore in FY24 (down 15% from ₹1,094 crore in FY23) on revenue of ₹614 crore, and has publicly targeted a path to profitability (Entrackr; Business Standard, February 2025).

Sources

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

• Inc42, “InMobi Group Strengthens Content Play With Roposo Acquisition,” November 2019
• YourStory, “InMobi’s Glance acquires short video content platform Roposo,” November 2019
• Wikipedia, “Roposo,” accessed September 2026
• Wikipedia, “Glance (company),” accessed September 2026
• TechCrunch, “Fashion Discovery Site Roposo Grabs $5M From Tiger Global,” 2015
• TechCrunch, “Multilingual Indian video app Roposo raises $10M from Tiger Global and Bertelsmann,” December 2018
• Entrackr, “Roposo lost Rs 20.6 crore to earn revenue of Rs 3.84 Cr in FY18,” October 2018
• Entrackr, “Roposo is kicking off Series D round with $5 Mn from Tiger Global,” May 2019
• Inc42, “Roposo Financials — Revenue, P&L & Cash Flow,” accessed September 2026
• South China Morning Post, “Business booms for Indian app Roposo after Chinese rival TikTok banned,” 2020
• Exchange4media, “Roposo has 5,00,000 new users an hour since TikTok ban: Report,” June 2020
• YourStory, “Glance’s Roposo forays into online shopping with launch of live commerce,” October 2021
• Inc42, “InMobi’s Roposo Forays Into Online Shopping With Creator-Led Live Commerce,” October 2021
• YourStory, “InMobi’s Glance acquires social commerce startup Shop101,” June 2021
• Business Standard, “InMobi’s Glance enters influencer-led shopping with Shop101 acquisition,” June 2021
• PYMNTS, “InMobi’s Glance Acquires Shop101 For Live Social eCommerce In India,” June 2021
• Entrackr, “InMobi’s Glance records 77% growth in FY23; losses cross Rs 1,000 Cr,” April 2024
• Entrackr (Fintrackr), “Glance crosses Rs 600 Cr revenue in FY24 with improved economics,” 2025
• Businessworld, “Glance Reports 89% Revenue Surge In FY24, Cuts Losses To Rs 929 Cr,” 2025
• TechCrunch, “Jio Platforms invests $200 million in Google-backed Glance,” February 2022
• Business Standard, “Glance raises $200mn from Jio Platforms; partners with Reliance Retail,” February 2022
• YourStory, “Glance launches live-video platform Roposo in Indonesia,” October 2023
• Glance newsroom, “Roposo invites Gen-Z to ‘Feel the Vibe’ with trending LIVE entertainment and shopping,” December 2023
• Business Standard, “Google-backed Glance targets profitability in yr, eyes AI-powered growth,” February 2025

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