Startup Deep Dive : Third Eye Distillery — a global award-winning gin still distilled under someone else’s licence

In October 2020, a gin distilled in a leased shed in Goa did something no Indian spirit had done before: it won a Gold Outstanding medal at the International Wine & Spirit Competition in London, one of only eight in the world that year to clear the bar out of roughly 800 entries, scoring 98 out of 100. The gin was Stranger & Sons, then barely two years old, built by three first-time distillers who did not own the licence to distil it.

Third Eye Distillery, the company behind the brand, has since raised roughly $10 million from investors including a Norwest Venture Partners India partner and film producer Ritesh Sidhwani, bought a majority stake in a mixers brand, and pushed into whisky and rum. Yet the contradiction from year one has not fully gone away: Stranger & Sons is still made under someone else’s excise licence, at a shared distillery on Goa’s Fullarton estate, and it reaches shelves in only around 11 Indian states even as it ships to 17-plus countries abroad. This is the story of a gin built to prove Indian spirits could be premium that ended up more easily bought abroad than at home.

Quick facts

What they do

Third Eye Distillery is a Goa-rooted spirits company built around one core product: Stranger & Sons, a gin distilled with nine Indian botanicals — including Indian coriander, black pepper and citrus peel — and sold to India’s urban, premium-drinking cohort, with a 750ml bottle priced at roughly ₹1,450 in Goa and considerably more elsewhere once state excise duty is added. Around the flagship gin, the founders have assembled a small “house of brands”: Short Story (vodka, dry gin and rum, launched August 2022), Otherside Subcontinental Whiskey (launched February 2025), and — through a majority acquisition — Svami, a non-alcoholic mixers label sold in Indian metros and a handful of export markets. The customer is less the neighbourhood bar and more the retail shopper and hospitality trade willing to pay a premium for a spirit marketed as authentically Indian rather than imported.

The origin

The founding insight came to Sakshi Saigal in Barcelona, where she was studying for an MBA and noticed gin bars opening on seemingly every corner — a category India, then dominated by whisky and imported labels, had almost no home-grown answer to. Saigal brought the idea to her husband Rahul Mehra, a hotel-management graduate who had already worked in beverage distribution and homebrewed for years before co-founding The Gateway Brewing Co, and to her cousin Vidur Gupta, who had a food-industry background and was based in the UK at the time. The three researched distilling practices in Scotland, Amsterdam and Barcelona before settling on Goa, reasoning that its climate and tourist-driven drinking culture made it the natural home for a craft Indian gin. They put in roughly ₹2.5 crore of family-and-friends money, imported stills from Amsterdam, sourced bottles from Italy and corks from Portugal, and spent close to a year simply settling on a name before launching Stranger & Sons in 2018 under a company then called Freehand Beverages. Mehra has since described the category they entered as “quite dull”, with no real conversation happening between brands and Indian drinkers — so instead of copying a London recipe, they built the gin around Indian botanicals and an India-forward label.

The struggle years

Two setbacks defined the early years, and neither was bad luck so much as the cost of inexperience. The first was technical: the founders’ test batches, built around imported Bulgarian coriander, turned unusably harsh once the gin went into full production using Indian-grown coriander, which they discovered was far more potent — forcing a full recalibration of the botanical mix before the product they had spent a year naming could actually reach a shelf. The second was structural, and it has never fully gone away: to distil legally at all, Third Eye had to lease space inside Fullarton Distilleries in Khandepar, South Goa, and produce Stranger & Sons under Fullarton’s excise licence rather than one of its own, because India’s state-by-state excise regime makes an independent distilling licence slow and capital-intensive to obtain. That dependency kept showing its cost: Mehra has described excise-duty increases announced with only days’ notice, leaving the company scrambling to work out compliance for shipments already on the road. The upshot was a brand that could win awards abroad far faster than it could add a new Indian state to its map — seven years after launch, Stranger & Sons was sold in only around 11 domestic markets even as it had reached more than 17 countries overseas.

The turning point

The moment that changed Stranger & Sons’ trajectory arrived in October 2020, when International Wine & Spirit Competition judges in London awarded it a Gold Outstanding medal — a 98-out-of-100 score that put it among just eight gins worldwide, out of roughly 800 entries, to clear that bar that year, and made it the first Indian gin to do so. Before the award, Stranger & Sons was a two-year-old, founder-funded brand selling in Goa and Maharashtra alone. After it, the international story accelerated fast: within months the brand was fulfilling one of its largest-ever single orders, for the UK’s Craft Gin Club, the country’s biggest gin subscription service, during the depths of the 2020 pandemic lockdowns. The medal gave the founders a credible, judge-verified answer to the scepticism they had faced pitching a homegrown Indian gin as a premium product — and it is the moment outside investors and the trade press consistently point back to when explaining why institutional money followed a few funding rounds later.

The money behind it

Third Eye Distillery has been funded in two distinct phases: a bootstrapped build-out, followed by institutional rounds once the IWSC win had de-risked the category story.

• Initial capital: about ₹2.5 crore from family and friends to fund the first distillery run and equipment import.
• Total raised since: approximately $10 million across three funding rounds, as reported by Forbes India and The Established.
• Named backers: Niren Shah of Norwest Venture Partners India; film producer Ritesh Sidhwani; former Citibank India CEO Pramit Jhaveri; Akshay Tanna; and Priya Sharma Ranjan.
• What backers changed: Norwest’s Niren Shah and the finance-industry investors are credited in the trade press with bringing the governance and category-scaling experience that pushed the company from a single Goa-only gin toward a multi-brand strategy.
• August 2022: Third Eye used its own capital reserves — not fresh equity — to buy a 51% controlling stake in Svami, valuing the mixers brand at about ₹100 crore.
• October 2024: CEO Rahul Mehra said the company was in the market to raise a further $5-6 million to fund expansion, including a new production facility.
• Latest valuation: data platform Tracxn estimates the company at roughly ₹140 crore as of February 2025 — a figure the company has not confirmed, and one Tracxn itself shows as lower than an earlier ₹293 crore mark it attributes to April 2019, a reminder that early venture marks on a pre-revenue brand are not reliable like-for-like comparators.

How it makes money

The business is a branded-alcohol model, complicated by the way India taxes and licenses drinking at the state level.

• Money in: retail sale of bottled spirits — gin, whisky, vodka and rum — through state-licensed retail and hospitality channels, plus a smaller export and duty-free channel.
• Retail price varies sharply by state because excise duty, transport cost and retailer margin are each set independently — the same 750ml bottle of Stranger & Sons runs from roughly ₹1,450 in Goa to well above that in states with heavier excise duty.
• Costs out: botanicals, glass and packaging sourced internationally (bottles from Italy, corks from Portugal), third-party distilling and bottling fees paid to Fullarton Distilleries, state excise duty and licence fees, and logistics across a fragmented multi-state, multi-country network.
• Where the margin sits: the premium-priced own brands (Stranger & Sons, Otherside whiskey) carry materially higher gross margin potential than the mixers business acquired through Svami, which competes on volume against large multinational tonic-water and mixer brands.
• The part people get wrong: Third Eye does not fully control its own supply chain. It distils under a lease and a third party’s excise licence rather than owning the plant outright, so part of what looks like “manufacturing margin” from the outside is actually a facility fee paid to Fullarton Distilleries.
• Diversification logic: co-founder Vidur Gupta has described the Svami and Countertop acquisitions as building a “house of brands” on the model of Diageo or Pernod Ricard — spreading single-licence, single-category risk across alcoholic and non-alcoholic revenue lines.

The numbers

Audited, government-filed figures exist only for Third Eye Distillery Holdings Pvt Ltd, the group’s holding entity, and even those stop at the revenue line in the free tier of India’s company-registry trackers; profit or loss is not publicly available. This section reports only what is independently verifiable.

• FY23 revenue: ₹19.4 crore, up 7% year-on-year, per Third Eye Distillery Holdings Pvt Ltd’s audited MCA filing.
• Company-stated current revenue: about ₹60 crore, which CEO Rahul Mehra told The Established the company was targeting to grow to roughly ₹100 crore the following year on the back of 100% year-on-year growth — a company target and estimate, not an audited outcome.
• Volume: more than 60,000 cases sold across the group’s brands in FY2023-24, per Forbes India.
• Net profit or loss: not disclosed in any source accessible without a paid company-data subscription; treat the company as financially private beyond top-line revenue.

The gap between the audited ₹19.4 crore FY23 figure and the company’s own roughly ₹60 crore claim is large enough that readers should treat the higher number as a founder-stated estimate rather than a confirmed like-for-like figure — the two may also cover different scopes, since the group’s revenue base widened once Svami and Short Story were consolidated.

Where the money comes from

Third Eye Distillery does not publish a formal segment split, but its own disclosures point to a business concentrated in a handful of Indian states with a smaller but faster-growing export tail.

• Domestic footprint: about 11 Indian markets (states and union territories) as of the company’s most recent public count, led by Goa, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Delhi.
• International footprint: 17-plus markets including the UK, US, UAE, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Italy and Vietnam — a wider geographic spread than the domestic business.
• Product-line split: Stranger & Sons gin remains the flagship revenue driver; Short Story (vodka, gin, rum) and Otherside whiskey are newer and smaller lines; Svami adds a separate non-alcoholic revenue stream the group has only consolidated since August 2022.
• The surprise: a brand built to prove an Indian spirits story sells in more countries abroad than states at home — a direct result of India’s state-wise excise licensing being harder to scale than export paperwork.
• Channel mix: retail off-trade, hospitality on-trade (bars and restaurants), and a UK subscription-box order fulfilled during 2020 that the company has cited as one of its largest single orders to date.

The risks

• Licensing dependency: Stranger & Sons is distilled at Fullarton Distilleries under Fullarton’s excise licence, not one Third Eye owns itself — any change to that lease or licensing relationship would directly halt or delay production.
• Regulatory fragmentation: India regulates alcohol state by state, with different excise duty rates, licence rules and duty changes announced with little lead time — the reason, by the founders’ own account, that the brand is present in only around 11 states after seven-plus years in business.
• Execution risk from rapid diversification: the group has added Svami, Countertop, Short Story and Otherside whiskey to a single gin brand within about three years, while its only publicly disclosed audited revenue (₹19.4 crore, FY23) remains modest relative to the ambitions of a Diageo- or Pernod Ricard-style house of brands.
• Crowded and consolidating category: Stranger & Sons competes against homegrown craft rivals such as Jaisalmer, Greater Than and Hapusa, and against deep-pocketed multinational gins such as Bombay Sapphire, in a domestic gin market Forbes India cites as growing from $914.7 million in 2020 to a projected $1,598.2 million by 2030 — attractive growth that is also drawing in better-funded competitors.

The takeaway

Stranger & Sons shows how a single, credible, judged award can do the work of years of marketing spend: the 2020 IWSC medal is the one event every subsequent funding round and press profile traces back to. But the same story is a caution against mistaking global recognition for domestic scale. Seven years in, the company that set out to prove Indian gin could be premium is still, by its own founders’ account, easier to buy in London or Dubai than in most of India — because the hardest part of the business was never the recipe. It was the licence.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded Third Eye Distillery and Stranger & Sons gin?

Rahul Mehra, Sakshi Saigal and Vidur Gupta founded the company in 2018. Mehra and Saigal are married, and Saigal and Gupta are cousins.

Where is Stranger & Sons gin made?

It is distilled in Khandepar, South Goa, at Fullarton Distilleries, where Third Eye leases production space and distils under Fullarton’s excise licence rather than a licence of its own.

How much funding has Third Eye Distillery raised?

Reported figures put total funding at approximately $10 million across three rounds, from investors including Norwest Venture Partners India’s Niren Shah and film producer Ritesh Sidhwani. The CEO said in October 2024 that the company was seeking a further $5-6 million.

Is Third Eye Distillery profitable or listed on a stock exchange?

No. It is a private, unlisted company. Its only publicly available audited revenue figure — ₹19.4 crore for the year to March 2023 — comes from an MCA filing, and no profit or loss figure has been disclosed in any source accessible without a paid subscription.

What other brands does Third Eye Distillery own besides Stranger & Sons?

It sells Short Story vodka, gin and rum (launched August 2022) and Otherside Subcontinental Whiskey (launched February 2025), and holds a 51% controlling stake in mixers brand Svami and a majority stake in hospitality consultancy Countertop, both acquired in August 2022.

Sources

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

• Forbes India, “Behind India’s ‘gin in the bottle’ movement”, March 2019
• The Whisky Advisor, “Stranger & Sons Gin — Craft Distilling in India”, May 2019
• Forbes, profile of Vidur Gupta, updated May 2022
• M&A Critique, “Third Eye Distillery takes controlling stake in Svami”, 22 August 2022
• Hotelier India, “Stranger & Sons bags top accolades at world spirits competitions in 2021”
• The Gin Guild, Ginopedia entries on Stranger & Sons and Third Eye Distillery, accessed September 2026
• Oak and Still, “Stranger and Sons”, accessed September 2026
• The Established, “Rising star: Rahul Mehra of Third Eye Distillery is keen on building Indian liquor brands that will trend globally”, 19 January 2024
• Forbes India, “How Third Eye Distillery is playing a part in India’s gin revolution”, 4 March 2024
• Deccan Herald, “Third Eye Distillery plans launch of 2 brown spirits this year”, 14 October 2024
• WineWhiskyWorld, “Third Eye Distillery Enters the Whisky Market with Otherside Whiskey”, February 2025
• Tracxn, company profiles for Stranger & Sons and Third Eye Distillery Private Limited, accessed September 2026
• thecompanycheck.com, FY 2026 profile of Third Eye Distillery Holdings Private Limited, accessed September 2026

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