Startup Deep Dive : Supertails — how three ex-Licious founders built a Rs 108 crore pet care platform that still burns cash

In FY25 Supertails sold ₹108.3 crore (about $11.3 million) worth of pet food, medicine and vet visits, a 68% jump in a single year. In the same year it lost ₹52.5 crore, which means the company spent roughly ₹1.53 to earn every ₹1 of revenue. That gap is the whole story of Supertails: a business growing fast enough to attract a $30 million cheque in February 2026, and burning fast enough that the cheque was necessary.

The company was built by three people who had already done this once. Varun Sadana, Vineet Khanna and Aman Tekriwal ran operations, supply chain and finance at Licious, the meat-delivery brand, before they left to sell kibble and telemedicine to India’s dogs and cats. Their bet is that Indian pet owners are turning into “pet parents” who will pay for premium food, on-app vets and same-day delivery — and that owning the whole stack, from advice to accessories, is worth the cash it takes to build. This is a look at whether the numbers back that bet.

Quick facts

What Supertails actually does

Supertails is a full-stack online pet-care platform aimed at India’s dog and cat owners. It sells the routine stuff — food, treats, litter, toys, accessories and pharmacy items — and wraps a services layer around it so the app is more than a store.

• Product marketplace: pet food, treats, grooming and accessories, with more than 500 brands onboarded (company-stated, 2026).
• In-house private labels alongside third-party brands, which the company positions as higher-margin.
• Tele-veterinary consultations and at-home vet care — vaccinations, consultations and preventive care through a network of 100-plus veterinarians (company-stated, 2026).
• Online dog-behaviour training and content aimed at first-time owners.
• Quick delivery of 30,000-plus products, launched in Bengaluru and planned for its top cities (company-stated, 2026).

The customer is the urban, first-time “pet parent” — the buyer who wants advice as much as a product, and who the company hopes will return monthly for food and medicine rather than once a year for a toy.

The origin: three Licious alumni and 300 interviews

The idea did not start in 2021. Varun Sadana and Vineet Khanna say they first sketched a pet-care platform in 2017, while they were still inside Licious, the online meat brand. Sadana was chief operating officer there; Khanna ran supply chain as a senior vice-president; Aman Tekriwal, a chartered accountant, was the finance lead. All three had also passed through Snapdeal in its scaling years, and Sadana and Khanna had known each other since their MBA at IIM Lucknow.

What they took from Licious was a specific playbook: in a fragmented, trust-poor Indian category, the company that controls the supply chain and speaks directly to the customer can build a brand where none existed. Meat was that category once. Pet care, they argued, was the next one — full of anxious first-time owners, thin on reliable advice, and served mostly by neighbourhood shops and a scatter of imported brands.

They left Licious in January 2021 and, before writing a line of code, ran more than 300 interviews with pet parents. Two clusters of need came back: food, nutrition, training and healthcare on one side; grooming, boarding, travel and insurance on the other. Supertails was built to own the first cluster deeply — the recurring, high-frequency spend — and to use veterinary advice as the hook that made the app sticky rather than just another shopping tab.

The struggle years

Supertails did not have a near-death moment in the classic sense — it has never run out of money — but its early years show the hard grind of building a category and a supply chain at the same time, and the losses to match.

The first challenge was demand-side: convincing owners to buy pet food online at all, and to think of themselves as “parents” willing to pay for premium nutrition and vet advice rather than table scraps and the nearest clinic. That is slow, expensive education, and it shows up as marketing spend. The second challenge was operational. Early on the company wrestled with order synchronisation and inventory accuracy — gaps between what the app showed and what the warehouse actually held — the unglamorous plumbing that decides whether a same-day pet-medicine order arrives or not.

The financial cost of building through this is stark. Operating revenue rose from ₹7.82 crore in FY22 to ₹33 crore in FY23, but losses over the same window widened from ₹11.65 crore to ₹30.6 crore. Each year the company grew roughly four-fold and lost more money doing it. That is a deliberate choice — buy the category before rivals do — but it is also a treadmill: every year of growth demanded another year of external funding.

The turning point

The clearest single hinge is the move from a pure marketplace to a services-plus-quick-commerce model, and the Series B that funded it. In February 2024 Supertails raised $15 million in a round led by RPSG Capital Ventures, and earmarked it for exactly two things: deepening healthcare offerings for pets and beginning an offline and faster-delivery push.

The numbers on either side of that pivot tell the story. Before it, in FY24, operating revenue was ₹64.6 crore. In the year after, FY25, it reached ₹108.3 crore — a 68% jump that pushed the company past the ₹100 crore mark for the first time. On the customer side, the company had reported 150,000-plus pet parents and around 70,000 completed online consultations at the time of the Series B in early 2024; by the 2026 fundraise it was describing close to one million pet parents (company-stated). The bet that veterinary advice and speed — not just cheaper kibble — would drive repeat spend is what took Supertails from a small marketplace to a ₹100 crore-plus business.

The money behind it

Supertails has raised across seed, debt, and Series A, B and C rounds. The shape of the cap table matters as much as the total: consumer-focused funds who back brand-building over years.

• Seed: about $2.6 million, June 2021, led by DSG Consumer Partners and Saama Capital.
• Venture debt: ₹5.75 crore from Alteria Capital, September 2021.
• Series A: $10 million, November 2022, with Fireside Ventures.
• Series B: $15 million, February 2024, led by RPSG Capital Ventures.
• Series C: $30 million, February 2026, led by Venturi Partners, with Nippon India Alternative Investments and Titan Capital Winners Fund joining existing backers Fireside Ventures, RPSG Capital Ventures, Sauce VC and Saama Capital.

Named backers and what each brought:

• DSG Consumer Partners and Saama Capital — early conviction in the pet-parent thesis and the founding team’s Licious pedigree.
• Fireside Ventures — a specialist consumer-brand fund whose backing signalled Supertails was a brand play, not just a marketplace.
• Venturi Partners — the Series C lead, a growth investor focused on Indian and South-East Asian consumer businesses.

Total raised is reported differently across trackers — about $56 million cumulatively per Entrackr and roughly $64 million across seven rounds per Tracxn — the gap reflecting how each counts debt and extensions. The February 2026 Series C valued the company at around $130 million post-money (reported), a figure Supertails has not officially confirmed.

How it makes money

Supertails is, in cash terms, still overwhelmingly a retailer — it buys and resells pet products, and takes a margin. The services are the differentiator, not yet the earner.

• Product sales: the core. Supertails earns the retail margin between wholesale cost and shelf price, richer on its own private-label lines than on third-party brands.
• Cost of materials is the single biggest line — ₹83.3 crore in FY25, roughly half of all expenses — which is why gross margins on a marketplace this young stay thin.
• Veterinary and services revenue: consultation and at-home care fees. Real, but small (see the split below).
• Other income: franchise fees and advertising/brand placements on the platform, plus about ₹5 crore of non-operating income in FY25.

The part people get wrong is assuming the vet network is a profit centre today. It is mostly an acquisition-and-retention tool: free or cheap advice brings owners in and keeps them buying food and medicine, where the actual money is. The margin sits in the recurring product basket — food and pharmacy — not in the consultations that market it.

The numbers

Four years of accounts show a company compounding revenue hard while losses climb in absolute terms. All figures are from MCA filings as reported by Entrackr; units are ₹ crore.

• Revenue CAGR FY22 to FY25 is roughly 140% a year off a tiny base — the growth is real, but early.
• Total expenses in FY25 were ₹165.8 crore, up 53% from ₹108.4 crore in FY24 (MCA filing via Entrackr).
• EBITDA margin stood at -48.9% and ROCE at -52.58% in FY25 — the company burns roughly half of every rupee of revenue.
• Losses are widening more slowly than revenue is growing (28% versus 68% in FY25), which is the first sign the burn may be flattening relative to scale.

Where the money comes from

The revenue mix reveals how far Supertails still is from being the “services” company it markets itself as.

• Product sales: about ₹102.5 crore in FY25 — roughly 95% of operating revenue.
• Veterinary services: about ₹2.65 crore in FY25 — a low single-digit share.
• Other (franchise fees, advertising): the small remainder.

The surprise is the size of the gap. Supertails is described, and describes itself, as a full-stack pet-care and healthcare platform, and the vet network is central to its brand. Yet in hard rupees the services line is a rounding error next to product sales. The advice keeps customers loyal, but the cash still comes almost entirely from selling food and supplies — the same business a good offline pet store runs, done online and at national scale.

The risks

Three risks stand out, each with a clear mechanism.

• Funding dependence. With a net loss of ₹52.5 crore in FY25 and roughly ₹1.53 spent per ₹1 earned, Supertails cannot fund its own growth from operations. It needs recurring external capital; a colder funding market would force a choice between growth and survival, and the terms of any down-round would fall on existing shareholders.
• Horizontal competition on price. Pet food is a commodity that Amazon, Flipkart and quick-commerce players such as Zepto and Blinkit can stock and subsidise. If a customer’s recurring food order — the margin engine — migrates to a cheaper horizontal platform, Supertails is left holding the low-revenue services it uses to acquire, without the product sales that pay for them.
• Thin services monetisation. The strategy rests on services making the platform sticky and, eventually, profitable. At about ₹2.65 crore, or roughly 2.5% of operating revenue, veterinary care is nowhere near carrying the model yet. If it cannot be scaled into a real profit centre, Supertails remains a thin-margin retailer competing on delivery speed against far larger balance sheets.

The takeaway

Supertails is a clean test of a repeatable idea: take a fragmented, trust-poor Indian category, control the supply chain, and turn buyers into a loyal, high-frequency base by giving away advice. The Licious founders have run this play before, and in four years they have built a ₹100 crore-plus business from almost nothing. The unresolved question is the one every full-stack consumer brand eventually faces — whether the loyalty a services layer buys can be converted into margin before the capital that funds the loss runs low, or a bigger, cheaper rival takes the recurring basket that pays for everything. Growth has been proven. Economics has not. For anyone building in Indian consumer, that is the line worth watching: a brand is only as durable as the day it has to fund itself.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded Supertails and when?

Supertails is run by Pets Centric Private Limited, incorporated on 13 April 2021 in Bengaluru. It was co-founded by Varun Sadana, Vineet Khanna and Aman Tekriwal, who previously held operations, supply-chain and finance roles at the meat-delivery brand Licious.

How much money has Supertails raised?

It has raised across seed, debt, Series A, B and C rounds, including a $30 million Series C led by Venturi Partners in February 2026. Cumulative funding is reported at about $56 million (Entrackr) to $64 million (Tracxn), the gap reflecting how each tracker counts debt and extensions.

Is Supertails profitable?

No. In FY25 it posted operating revenue of ₹108.3 crore but a net loss of ₹52.5 crore, with an EBITDA margin of about -48.9% (MCA filing via Entrackr). It spent roughly ₹1.53 for every ₹1 of revenue.

What is Supertails valued at?

Around $130 million post-money following the February 2026 Series C, according to reports. Supertails has not officially confirmed the figure, so it should be treated as reported rather than company-stated.

How does Supertails make money?

Mostly by reselling pet food, medicine and supplies at a retail margin — about 95% of FY25 operating revenue came from product sales. Veterinary consultations, at-home care, franchise fees and platform advertising make up the small remainder.

Sources

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

• Entrackr — “Petcare startup Supertails crosses Rs 100 Cr revenue in FY25; losses surge 28%” (FY25 and FY24 financials, expense and segment split), 2026.
• Entrackr — “Petcare startup Supertails raises $30 Mn led by Venturi Partners” (Series C, investors, business model), September 2026.
• Entrackr — “Pet care startup Supertails scoops up $15 Mn in Series B” (FY22 and FY23 financials, Series B), February 2024.
• Inc42 — “Supertails Nets $15 Mn To Expand Healthcare Offerings For Pets, Offline Foray” (Series B use of funds, metrics), February 2024.
• StartupTalky — “Supertails: Founders | Funding | Product & Services” (founder backgrounds, origin, funding history), 2026.
• Tracxn — “Supertails / Pets Centric Private Limited company profile” (total funding, rounds, employee count, competitors), February 2026.
• Zaubacorp / Tofler — Pets Centric Private Limited (CIN U52609KA2021PTC146482, incorporation date), 2026.
• Trading Economics — USD/INR reference rate, 18 September 2026.

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