In May 2025 the company behind toothsi agreed to raise fresh money at a valuation of ₹1,055 crore, roughly 53% below the ₹2,231 crore it had commanded only sixteen months earlier, as per Entrackr’s reading of its regulatory filings. Nine months after taking that haircut, the same company announced it was acquiring Zenyum, a Singapore clear-aligner brand that had raised $56 million from L Catterton and Sequoia Capital India, and calling the result Asia’s largest consumer dental company.
That sequence, a down round followed by a regional takeover, is the whole toothsi story in miniature. Four Mumbai orthodontists built a direct-to-consumer aligner brand that grew revenue from ₹14.6 crore in FY21 to ₹178.9 crore in FY24, burned ₹3.36 for every rupee it earned at the peak, laid off staff when a funding round would not close, and then cut costs hard enough to claim EBITDA profitability. This piece walks through the filings, the funding and the merger, and asks what the numbers actually support.
Quick facts
| Company | MakeO Healthcare Technologies Private Limited (CIN U85310MH2017PTC294169), Mumbai; brands toothsi (clear aligners, oral care) and skinnsi (skin and hair treatments) |
| Founded | Entity incorporated 21 April 2017 (Tofler); toothsi brand launched November 2018 |
| Founder(s) | Dr Arpi Mehta Shah (CEO), Dr Pravin Shetty, Dr Manjul Jain, Dr Anirudha Kale, all orthodontists |
| Businesses | Direct-to-consumer clear aligners made in-house, teeth whitening and oral-care products, dental experience centres and acquired clinics, laser hair reduction and skin treatments under skinnsi |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹178.94 crore operating revenue in FY24, up 6.2% on ₹168.43 crore in FY23 (Inc42, from RoC filings); FY25 figures not publicly reported as of September 2026 |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Net loss of ₹149.58 crore in FY24, narrowed 32.1% from ₹220.25 crore in FY23 (Inc42, from RoC filings) |
| Listed | Private |
| Market value / last valuation | ₹1,055 crore in the May 2025 round (reported by Entrackr), down from ₹2,231 crore in January 2024; Zenyum deal terms undisclosed |
| Key shareholders / CEO | Eight Roads Ventures (nominee director Prem Pavoor on the board), 360 One Asset, Paramark Ventures, Think Investments, IIFL, Ashish Kacholia’s office, PharmEasy co-founder Siddharth Shah; CEO Arpi Mehta Shah |
What they do
toothsi sells clear plastic aligners that straighten teeth without metal braces, aimed at working-age Indians who can afford a cosmetic dental treatment but do not want to wear braces for a year. The customer books a free 3D scan at home or at one of the company’s experience centres, an in-house orthodontist designs a digital treatment plan, the aligner sets are printed and thermoformed in the company’s own Mumbai facility, and progress is then monitored through the makeO app. Since September 2022 the parent has traded as makeO, folding in skinnsi, which sells laser hair reduction and skin treatments delivered at home or in centres. Company-stated scale, as of September 2026: more than 3 lakh smiles designed, over 2.5 lakh laser hair removal sessions, and a 20,000 square foot ISO 13485-certified manufacturing plant (makeo.app).
The origin
The founders were practising clinicians, not technologists. Arpi Mehta trained at Nair Hospital Dental College in Mumbai, specialised in lingual orthodontics in Paris and Geneva, and ran her own orthodontic practice before toothsi (CEO Insights; Forbes India, August 2021). Pravin Shetty is credited with building India’s first CAD/CAM lingual bracket system, Lingualmatrix, and a digital aligner system called SmileAligners (CEO Insights). Manjul Jain and Anirudha Kale brought roughly 30 and 25 years of orthodontic practice respectively, per the company’s own bios (makeo.app).
The founding insight came from the chair. Mehta had watched young adults decline treatment because braces were visible, and she pointed to a figure the company repeated for years: only about 10% of the roughly 600 million Indians who could benefit from smile correction were getting it (CEO Insights, citing the company). The first year was small. Inc42 reported FY18 revenue of ₹53 lakh and FY19 revenue of ₹1.84 crore against ₹2.93 crore of expenses, a business the size of a busy clinic. What differentiated it from a clinic was the full-stack choice made early: toothsi did its own counselling, scanning, treatment planning and manufacturing rather than reselling an imported aligner, which is the decision that later made both the margins and the cost base look the way they do.
The struggle years
Growth arrived with the pandemic, and so did the losses. Revenue rose from ₹5.06 crore in FY20 to ₹14.6 crore in FY21, but the net loss widened from ₹7.54 crore to ₹28.94 crore in the same period, as per Entrackr’s March 2022 report on the filings. Then FY22 happened. Operating revenue jumped 5.3 times to ₹78.45 crore, but total expenses rose six times to ₹263.4 crore and the loss reached ₹184.29 crore. Advertising and promotion alone went up 15.7 times to ₹66.97 crore, which was 85.4% of that year’s revenue, and the company spent ₹3.36 for every rupee it earned (Entrackr, December 2022). The money was being spent on a home-visit model that does not scale cheaply: therapist charges of ₹32.02 crore and teeth-scanning costs of ₹20.04 crore appear as their own lines in FY22.
The rebrand to makeO in September 2022, with Virat Kohli and Anushka Sharma signed as brand ambassadors (BestMediaInfo, 27 September 2022), doubled down on the spend. FY23 revenue more than doubled to ₹168.4 crore, but expenses climbed to ₹394.8 crore and the loss set a new record at ₹220.2 crore. Employee costs were ₹127.4 crore, of which ₹21 crore was ESOP expense, marketing was ₹91 crore, and consultant fees, largely the visiting dentists and therapists, were ₹60.4 crore (Inc42, March 2024). Then the capital markets closed. By April 2023 the company had laid off 20 to 30 people across its tech, product and testing teams “in an attempt to extend its runway, as it struggles to close a fresh funding round” (Startup Story, May 2023). The round that eventually came, in January 2024, was described by YourStory as a bridge round, not a Series D.
The turning point
The turning point was not a product launch or a celebrity. It was the FY24 cost reset, visible line by line in the filings. Revenue barely moved, up 6.2% to ₹178.94 crore. But total expenditure fell 15.8% from ₹394.85 crore to ₹332.41 crore, marketing dropped 24.4% to ₹68.77 crore, consultant fees were cut 57% to ₹26 crore, and employee costs slipped 6.4% to ₹119.33 crore. The net loss narrowed 32.1% to ₹149.58 crore and the EBITDA loss shrank from ₹202.21 crore to ₹120.95 crore, taking the EBITDA margin from about minus 120% to minus 68% (Inc42, January 2025; Entrackr, January 2025). Spend per rupee of revenue went from ₹2.35 in FY23 to ₹1.85 in FY24.
That reset bought credibility with existing investors even at a lower price, and it is the basis of the claim the company made in February 2026 that it had turned EBITDA positive (Inc42, 11 February 2026, quoting the company). The numbers on either side are stark: a business that lost ₹220 crore on ₹168 crore of revenue in FY23, and a business that, on its own account and not yet in any public filing, was operating at a positive EBITDA by early 2026 and buying a rival of comparable revenue. The FY25 and FY26 filings, when they reach the Registrar of Companies, will show whether the second half of that sentence holds.
The money behind it
The funding history reads like a valuation curve drawn by the Indian startup market itself: up through 2022, flat in 2024, sharply down in 2025.
- Series A, January 2021: $5 million led by Think Investments (Inc42, August 2021).
- Series B, August 2021: $20 million led by Eight Roads Ventures, Think Investments and the Mankekar Family Office, with angels including PharmEasy co-founders Siddharth Shah and Dharmil Sheth and Bain & Company’s Karan Singh; the company had 10,000 customers and around 800 staff at the time (Forbes India; Inc42, August 2021).
- Series C, March to April 2022: a ₹100 crore tranche led by IIFL Tech Large Value Fund (₹75 crore) and Mahendra Shah (₹25 crore) at a post-money valuation of about $252 million, per Entrackr’s filing analysis of 26 March 2022; Eight Roads announced the full $40 million round on 5 April 2022 with Paramark and the Medlife founders’ family office joining. The company also took about $9 million of venture debt from Stride Ventures (Entrackr, March 2022).
- Bridge round, January 2024: $16 million led by 360 One Asset and Ashish Kacholia’s investment office, with Eight Roads, Paramark and the Medlife founders returning, at a reported valuation of ₹2,231 crore, or about $265 million (Entrackr, January 2024 and May 2025).
- Down round, May to June 2025: ₹100 crore in two tranches, led by PharmEasy CEO Siddharth Shah (₹20 crore) with Mahendra Shah, 360 One, Paramark, Eight Roads and Kacholia, priced at ₹943.7 per preference share for a valuation of ₹1,055 crore, about 53% below January 2024 (Entrackr, May 2025; Business Outreach, May 2025).
- Total raised: “over $100 million” including debt, as per Inc42 in August 2025; Tracxn’s tally is about $120 million across ten rounds as of 2026.
Three backers changed the company’s shape. Eight Roads Ventures, the Fidelity-affiliated fund, led both the Series B and Series C, holds a board seat through nominee director Prem Pavoor (Tofler), and its India and Japan teams were cited at the Series C, which matters for a company now operating in Japan through Zenyum. IIFL’s ₹75 crore in March 2022 set the $252 million mark that later rounds were measured against. And Siddharth Shah, an angel since 2021, became the lead investor of the 2025 down round, the point at which insiders rather than new funds were pricing the company.
How it makes money
makeO is a vertically integrated medical-device seller with a services layer on top. The money comes in mostly as a one-time treatment fee, and the costs sit in people and marketing rather than materials.
- Aligner pricing, as of September 2026: Classic from ₹52,999, Ace from ₹77,999, Luxe from ₹97,999, with EMIs from ₹1,499 a month; higher tiers bundle retainers, whitening, extra refinement aligners and a one- or two-year warranty (makeo.app pricing page).
- Cost of materials is small: ₹28.7 crore in FY23 against ₹168.4 crore of revenue, about 17% (Inc42, March 2024). In-house manufacturing keeps the product margin high.
- The real costs are acquisition and delivery: marketing was ₹68.77 crore in FY24, 38.4% of revenue, down from 54.0% in FY23 and 85.4% in FY22; employee costs were ₹119.33 crore, 66.7% of FY24 revenue (Inc42; Entrackr).
- Clinical labour is partly variable: consultant fees for visiting dentists and therapists were ₹60.4 crore in FY23 and ₹26 crore in FY24 after the shift toward owned centres and partner clinics (Entrackr, January 2025).
- Second product line: skinnsi’s laser hair reduction and facials, sold as sessions and packages, added ₹51.73 crore in FY24 (Inc42, January 2025).
- Offline expansion: the ₹10.98 crore cash-and-stock purchase of Apple Dental, a chain of 20 clinics in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, in August 2025, described by the company as “the first step in our offline expansion strategy” (Entrackr; Inc42, August 2025).
The part people get wrong is to read toothsi as a software or “healthtech” business because it has an app. The app is a monitoring channel. The unit economics are those of a clinic chain that manufactures its own device: a high gross margin on each ₹53,000 to ₹98,000 case, eaten by the cost of finding the customer and sending a trained person to scan them. That is why the FY24 improvement came almost entirely from cutting marketing and consultants, and why the company is now buying and building physical clinics, which lower the per-visit cost of the scan but add rent and salaried staff.
The numbers
All figures are consolidated and from Registrar of Companies filings as reported by Entrackr and Inc42. FY25 numbers had not been reported by either outlet as of September 2026. The FY21 spend-per-rupee figure is derived from the reported totals; the rest are as published by Entrackr.
| Fiscal year | Operating revenue (₹ crore) | Total expenses (₹ crore) | Net loss (₹ crore) | Spend per ₹1 of revenue |
| FY21 | 14.6 | 43.8 | 28.94 | ₹3.00 |
| FY22 | 78.45 | 263.4 | 184.29 | ₹3.36 |
| FY23 | 168.43 | 394.85 | 220.25 | ₹2.35 |
| FY24 | 178.94 | 332.41 | 149.58 | ₹1.85 |
- FY24 revenue of ₹178.94 crore is about $18.6 million at ₹96.0 to the dollar.
- EBITDA margin: about minus 217% in FY22, minus 115% to minus 120% in FY23 depending on the outlet’s method, and minus 66% to minus 68% in FY24 (Entrackr; Inc42).
- Cash and bank balances at the end of FY24: ₹93 crore, against current assets of ₹153 crore (Entrackr, January 2025). Set against an FY24 EBITDA loss of ₹120.95 crore, that was under a year of runway, which explains the insider-led 2025 round.
- Cumulative net losses across FY21 to FY24: about ₹583 crore (derived from the four filings above), equal to roughly 55% of the company’s May 2025 valuation of ₹1,055 crore.
- Headcount: about 800 in August 2021 (Inc42); Tracxn estimates 765 employees as of May 2026, a 54% year-on-year decline, although that is a third-party estimate rather than a company disclosure.
Where the money comes from
- toothsi aligners and dental: ₹122.17 crore in FY24, 68.3% of operating revenue, up 5.4% from ₹115.86 crore in FY23 (Inc42). Entrackr groups the line slightly differently at ₹124 crore, or 69.2%.
- skinnsi skin and hair: ₹51.73 crore in FY24, 28.9% of revenue, up 8.0% from ₹47.91 crore (Inc42). In FY23 the same line had grown 313% from a very small FY22 base.
- Other products and services: the balance of roughly ₹5 crore in FY24 (derived from the two figures above).
- Back in FY22, before the rebrand, “device sales” of aligners, whitening kits and braces were ₹66.68 crore, or 85% of revenue, and “healthcare facilities income” was ₹11.77 crore (Entrackr, December 2022).
- Geography: the company states more than 210 Indian cities and five GCC locations, with 110+ experience centres (makeo.app, September 2026). Reuters put the dental network at over 50 centres and about 500 partner doctors at the time of the Zenyum announcement, and Inc42 at 60+ centres with a plan for 120+, so the 110+ figure likely includes skinnsi centres.
- Post-merger footprint: ten markets including India, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE, with about 1,100 partner dentists combined (Reuters via Yahoo Finance, February 2026).
The surprise is how little the mix has shifted. skinnsi was launched to give the company a second, repeat-purchase revenue line, and it did reach nearly 29% of revenue. But between FY23 and FY24 it grew only 8%, barely faster than aligners at 5.4%. A business built around one-off ₹50,000 to ₹1 lakh purchases has, so far, not found a recurring engine, which is one reason the growth strategy became acquisitions rather than new categories.
The risks
- Integration of a “merger of equals” with an undisclosed price. Zenyum’s CEO Julian Artopé told Dental Tribune that “both businesses are operating on similar top-line numbers”, and neither side disclosed valuation or the post-merger shareholding. Zenyum raised $56 million, including $25 million from L Catterton in its May 2021 Series B, and by 2021 was selling in eight markets from Singapore to Taiwan; it had 600 partner dentists at the time of the deal (TechCrunch, May 2021; Reuters, February 2026). The mechanism of risk is simple: two loss-making, consumer-marketing-heavy businesses, two CEOs kept in place, two supply chains and ten regulatory regimes, combined by a company that had ₹93 crore of cash at its last public balance-sheet date. Synergies were described as “especially on the supply chain side”, which means the upside depends on moving Zenyum’s manufacturing into makeO’s Mumbai plant, a multi-year exercise in medical-device regulation.
- Customer acquisition cost has been the whole story, and the lever may be exhausted. Marketing fell from 85% of revenue in FY22 to 38% in FY24 while revenue growth slowed from 115% to 6%. The company cannot cut its way to the revenue growth that a ₹1,055 crore valuation, let alone a regional platform, implies. If growth has to be bought again, the FY24 margin gains reverse.
- Clinical liability in a remote-monitored, at-home model. toothsi’s differentiator is a home scan and app-based monitoring rather than a clinic visit every few weeks. Its own pricing page carries a guarantee that “if your smile goal isn’t met, we will cover the extra aligners”, conditional on full adherence. Refinement aligners are a direct cost, and the company’s move into owned clinics and acquired chains such as Apple Dental is, in part, an acknowledgement that the pure at-home model needed a physical backstop.
- Cap-table pressure after a down round. The 2025 round issued convertible cumulative preference shares at ₹943.7 each, less than half the implied January 2024 price. Preference shares with cumulative rights sit ahead of common equity, including founder and ESOP holdings, and the company has been expensing ESOPs at ₹21 crore to ₹23 crore a year (Inc42). Any future listing, which Dental Tribune reported as a stated aspiration, will have to work through that stack.
The takeaway
The transferable lesson from toothsi is about what a down round can be used for. Most Indian consumer startups that took a 50% haircut in 2024 and 2025 treated it as a defensive event: raise from insiders, cut burn, wait. makeO did that, and the FY24 filings show the cuts were real. But it then used the repriced, insider-funded company as the acquirer in a stock-heavy combination with a better-funded rival, at a moment when Zenyum’s own investors, who had put in $56 million by 2021, were presumably also looking for an exit path. A lower valuation is a cheaper currency for the seller to accept and a more honest base from which to promise growth. Whether the combined business can generate the cash to justify it is a question for the FY26 numbers. The point is that the founders converted their weakest financing moment into the deal that defines the company, and they could only do that because the cost base had already been fixed on paper first.
Frequently asked questions
Who owns toothsi?
toothsi is a brand of MakeO Healthcare Technologies Private Limited, a Mumbai company incorporated on 21 April 2017 and run by co-founder and CEO Dr Arpi Mehta Shah. Institutional shareholders include Eight Roads Ventures, 360 One Asset, Paramark Ventures, Think Investments and IIFL, alongside individual investors such as Ashish Kacholia and PharmEasy co-founder Siddharth Shah.
How much does toothsi’s aligner treatment cost?
As of September 2026 the company lists three plans: Classic from ₹52,999, Ace from ₹77,999 and Luxe from ₹97,999, with EMIs starting at ₹1,499 a month. Final pricing depends on case complexity.
Is makeO profitable?
Not on its last public filing. In FY24 it reported a net loss of ₹149.58 crore on operating revenue of ₹178.94 crore, with an EBITDA loss of about ₹121 crore. In February 2026 the company said it had turned EBITDA positive, but that claim had not yet appeared in a filing available to the public as of September 2026.
What is the toothsi and Zenyum deal?
On 11 February 2026 makeO announced a definitive agreement to acquire Singapore-based Zenyum and combine the two businesses, with Arpi Mehta as group CEO, Julian Artopé continuing to run Zenyum, and a combined footprint of ten markets. Financial terms were not disclosed and completion was expected by the end of February 2026.
What is makeO’s valuation?
The most recent reported figure is ₹1,055 crore, the price at which existing investors led by Siddharth Shah agreed to invest in May 2025, according to Entrackr’s analysis of the company’s filings. That was about 53% below the ₹2,231 crore valuation of the January 2024 bridge round. No valuation has been disclosed for the Zenyum combination.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Inc42, “toothsi Parent makeO’s FY24 Loss Narrows 32% To INR 150 Cr”, January 2025
- Entrackr, “Toothsi parent MakeO reports flat revenue in FY24; losses trim 32%”, January 2025
- Inc42, “toothsi Parent makeO Posts INR 220 Cr Loss In FY23; Revenue Jumps Over 2X”, March 2024
- Entrackr, “Toothsi-parent MakeO’s revenue spikes 2X in FY23, posts Rs 220 Cr loss”, March 2024
- Entrackr, “Toothsi’s losses outpace revenue growth, up 6.3X to near Rs 180 Cr in FY22”, December 2022
- Entrackr, “Exclusive: Dental tech startup Toothsi raises Rs 100 Cr led by IIFL”, March 2022
- Eight Roads Ventures, “Dental tech startup toothsi raises $40 million”, April 2022
- Forbes India, “Dental tech startup toothsi raises $20 million”, August 2021
- Inc42, “Dental Tech Startup Toothsi Raises $20 Mn From Eight Roads, Think Investments”, August 2021
- Entrackr, “Toothsi parent MakeO scoops up $16 Mn in a new round”, January 2024
- Entrackr, “Exclusive: Toothsi parent MakeO set to raise fresh funds at 50% valuation cut”, May 2025
- Business Outreach, “MakeO to Raise Funds at 50% Valuation Cut”, May 2025
- Entrackr, “Exclusive: Toothsi-parent makeO to acquire Apple Dental”, August 2025
- Inc42, “toothsi Parent makeO Acquires Apple Dental For INR 11 Cr”, August 2025
- Inc42, “toothsi Parent makeO To Acquire Singapore-Based Zenyum”, February 2026
- Reuters via Yahoo Finance Singapore, “Zenyum, MakeO Toothsi to merge, creating Asian consumer dental group”, February 2026
- Dental Tribune International, “Zenyum and MakeO toothsi to merge, forming a pan-Asian dental leader”, February 2026
- Dental Asia, “Zenyum and MakeO to merge, creating Asia’s largest consumer dental company”, February 2026
- Zenyum, “Zenyum and MakeO to Join Forces to Create Asia’s Leading Consumer Dental Company”, February 2026
- Touchstone Partners, deal announcement on advising MakeO Healthcare Technologies Pvt. Ltd. on the Zenyum acquisition, February 2026
- TechCrunch, “Singapore-based D2C dental brand Zenyum raises $40M Series B from L Catterton, Sequoia India and other investors”, May 2021
- Startup Story, “Toothsi lays off employees as it struggles to close fresh funding round”, May 2023
- BestMediaInfo, “toothsi and skinnsi merge to launch makeO, onboards Virat Kohli and Anushka Sharma as brand ambassadors”, September 2022
- CEO Insights India, “Toothsi: India’s First & Largest At-Home Smile Make Over Service Provider”, undated company profile, accessed September 2026
- makeO, About us and toothsi pricing and FAQ pages (makeo.app), accessed September 2026
- Tofler, company profile for MakeO Healthcare Technologies Private Limited (CIN U85310MH2017PTC294169), accessed September 2026
- Tracxn, Makeo company profile, accessed September 2026
- Trading Economics, USD/INR, 18 September 2026
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