Startup Deep Dive : Zunpulse — the smart-home brand Godrej now controls

Every Zunpulse product page carries the same promise: buy a smart energy monitor, a smart fan and a couple of smart plugs, spend less than ₹10,000 once, and cut a household’s electricity bill by 40% to 50% (as per founder Pranesh Chaudhary, The Better India, December 2021). It is a specific, testable claim, and it comes from a brand that did not start life as a device company at all — it started as a solar rooftop installer working on other people’s roofs.

Ten years after Pranesh Chaudhary and Sushant Sachan founded that installer business, the entity behind Zunpulse, ZunRoof Tech Private Limited, has not reported an annual profit on any year of record, and the Godrej family office now owns more than 70% of it, up from a first cheque of $3 million in March 2022 (Entrackr, September 2025, citing TheKredible). A consumer brand built to help Indian households spend less is today majority-controlled by one of India’s oldest business families, not by the two engineers who built it — and that shift happened almost entirely inside the last three years.

Quick facts

What they do

Zunpulse sells IoT-enabled smart-home hardware directly to Indian households: smart plugs, bulbs, energy monitors, BLDC fans, door locks, video doorbells, cameras, and water and air purifiers, all controlled from a single app and compatible with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant (Tracxn). The brand says it has shipped more than 50 SKUs and reached over 100,000 homes (Tracxn), sold through its own website and app plus Amazon and Flipkart, with brand-owned experience stores planned. Zunpulse is not a separate company: it sits inside ZunRoof Tech Private Limited, the same Gurugram entity that designs, installs and finances rooftop solar systems for homeowners under the ZunRoof and ZunSolar names, so the smart-home brand shares a balance sheet and a profit-and-loss account with a much older, more capital-intensive solar-EPC business.

The origin

Pranesh Chaudhary grew up in Muzaffarpur and Sushant Sachan in Kanpur, in the 1990s, when long power cuts were a routine part of home life in both towns (The Better India, December 2021). The two met as students at IIT Kharagpur and stayed friends through their corporate careers afterwards: Chaudhary worked as a management consultant at Essex Lake Group in London and then at Capital One in Bangalore, building ten years of experience in risk analytics, marketing and operations, while Sachan spent more than a decade in solar power technology, including a senior technology-management role at Sunborne Energy Technologies (Energetica India). Chaudhary eventually left his job in London and returned home, and on 13 June 2016 the two co-founded ZunRoof, betting that Indian households needed a trustworthy, organised way to install rooftop solar. The idea that became Zunpulse — fixing the demand side of the same electricity problem, by helping people use less power inside the home rather than generate more of it on the roof — arrived four years later, after ZunRoof had already built out its solar installation and financing business.

The struggle years

• FY21 (year ended March 2021): revenue at roughly ₹42 crore, the last year before the company’s growth reversed (Inc42; The Better India).
• FY22 (year ended March 2022): revenue fell 36% year on year, as per Entrackr’s August 2023 report on the company’s filings, pulling the top line back to roughly the mid-₹20 crore range.
• FY23 (year ended March 2023): revenue recovered 15.5% to ₹29.85 crore, but the entity spent close to ₹2 crore for every ₹1 crore it earned — total expenses of ₹59.75 crore against a net loss of ₹29.48 crore, up 10.2% year on year, with component costs alone at ₹38.5 crore, 64.4% of total spend (Entrackr, August 2023).
• FY24 (year ended March 2024): revenue fell again, down 11.5% to ₹26.43 crore, even as the net loss was cut by 51.7% to ₹14.24 crore (Entrackr, December 2024) — the company shrank its way to a smaller loss rather than growing out of one.

The turning point

By March 2020, ZunRoof said it had crossed $1 million in monthly booked revenue and had already pre-booked more than 50,000 zunpulse devices from business buyers — commercial clients, real-estate developers, hotels, hospitals and co-living operators — before the consumer product carried a public name (Energetica India). On 22 September 2020, in the middle of India’s pandemic year, the company put an app and a retail identity on that pre-sold hardware and launched Zunpulse to households, with founder Pranesh Chaudhary framing it as “the first milestone in our mission of democratizing smart home tech” (Energetica India). The timing mattered as much as the product: a home-comfort brand went to market exactly as Indian consumers were spending the most time inside their houses in living memory, converting an internal B2B product line built for offices and developments into the entity’s best-known consumer brand.

The money behind it

• 2016-2018: seed capital from IIT Kharagpur seniors and friends-and-family angel investors (The Better India).
• Institutional angel backing from Intellecap Impact Investment Network, alongside individual investors Ramakant Sharma, Gaurav Gupta and Vismay Sharma (Energetica India; Tracxn).
• 2019-2020: Godrej Family Fund invests close to $4 million combined across two follow-on rounds, its first entry into the company (The Better India).
• March 2022: $3 million Series A from Godrej Investments (Entrackr, August 2023).
• December 2024: ₹20 crore (about $2.3 million) from ANBG Enterprise LLP, the Godrej family office, and angel investor Ravindernath Chadha; Godrej already held 51% of the company going into this round (Entrackr, December 2024).
• September 2025: ₹25 crore (about $2.85 million) from ANBG Enterprise LLP plus angels John Diaz and S Sunil Edwards, with fresh shares priced at ₹5,239 apiece; this round took Godrej’s holding past 70% (Entrackr, September 2025, citing TheKredible).
• Total raised to date: more than $15 million, up from about $9 million as of December 2024 (Entrackr).

What each backer changed is visible in the sequence: the early angels and Intellecap kept the founders solvent long enough to reach product-market fit in solar; Godrej, entering from 2019 onward, is the only investor that has kept writing cheques through five straight years of reported losses, and in doing so has moved from minority backer to controlling shareholder.

How it makes money

Zunpulse earns the way most direct-to-consumer hardware brands do: money comes in from selling a physical device once, not from a subscription or a platform take rate. It designs its SKUs, has them contract-manufactured, and sells them at a markup through its own website and app and through Amazon and Flipkart (Tracxn). Its core pitch bundles an energy monitor, a smart fan and smart plugs at under ₹10,000, priced low enough to be an impulse purchase rather than a considered one (The Better India). Costs, at least across the wider ZunRoof Tech entity that also builds and finances rooftop solar, are dominated by components: in FY23, component costs alone were ₹38.5 crore, 64.4% of total expenditure, against employee costs of just ₹11.1 crore (Entrackr) — a business where the bill of materials, not headcount, drives the profit-and-loss account, and where import and component-price swings on batteries, sensors and chips affect margin more than anything the company controls domestically. The part outsiders tend to get wrong is that Zunpulse is not a standalone filer with its own published accounts: every revenue and loss figure in this piece is booked inside ZunRoof Tech Private Limited alongside the solar-EPC business, and no public source breaks out what the smart-home brand alone earns or loses.

The numbers

Figures below are revenue from operations and net loss for ZunRoof Tech Private Limited, in ₹ crore, as reported by Entrackr from the company’s regulatory filings. Zunpulse does not file separate accounts.

Two things stand out. First, this is not a steady growth line: revenue fell 36% in FY22, recovered 15.5% in FY23, then fell again by 11.5% in FY24, meaning the business has been smaller in FY24 than it was three years earlier in FY21, when revenue stood at roughly ₹42 crore (Inc42; The Better India). Second, the loss line improved only because spending was cut hard, not because revenue grew: FY24’s loss nearly halved even as the top line shrank, which is consistent with cost reduction rather than a turnaround in demand.

Where the money comes from

• By brand: rooftop solar design, installation and financing (ZunRoof, ZunSolar) versus IoT smart-home devices (Zunpulse, ZunVolt) — both booked under the single parent, ZunRoof Tech Private Limited, with no public split disclosed by brand (Tracxn; Entrackr).
• By channel: the company’s own website and app, plus Amazon and Flipkart marketplaces, with brand-owned experience stores stated as a future plan (Tracxn).
• By geography: the solar side of the business has covered more than 75 cities across 12 Indian states from its Gurugram base, serving over 3,500 solar customers to date (Energetica India) — the clearest geography figure on record, though it describes the older solar-installation business rather than Zunpulse devices specifically, which sell pan-India online through marketplaces.

The surprise is less about the split and more about its absence: for a brand marketed as one of India’s fastest-growing smart-home names, with more than 100,000 homes served and over 50 SKUs (Tracxn), Zunpulse has never had a standalone revenue figure reported anywhere in the public record. Every disclosed number describes ZunRoof Tech as a whole, an entity still anchored by the older, structurally thinner-margin solar-EPC business it started as.

The risks

• Ownership concentration: Godrej’s stake had already reached 51% by December 2024 and crossed 70% by September 2025 (Entrackr) after five institutional cheques since 2019, meaning each fresh round needed to keep funding losses has come at the cost of founder control, even though the founders remain the public face and CEO of the business.
• Structural margin exposure: component costs ran to 64.4% of total expenditure in FY23, and the entity spent close to ₹2 for every ₹1 of revenue that year (Entrackr) — a cost base exposed to global component, battery and shipping prices that the company has not disclosed any hedging or long-term supply contracts against.
• Shrinking core revenue: consolidated revenue fell in two of the three fiscal years on record — down 36% in FY22 and 11.5% again in FY24 (Entrackr) — with the FY24 loss narrowing chiefly because costs were cut faster than revenue fell, not because the smart-home push offset the decline.
• Category crowding: Zunpulse competes for shelf space and search visibility against far larger, better-funded players in Indian smart-home and small-appliance retail, including Atomberg, Xiaomi, Havells and Schneider Electric (Tracxn), none of which carry a loss-making solar-EPC business on the same balance sheet.

The takeaway

The transferable lesson here has little to do with fans, plugs or solar panels: when a promising consumer brand is built inside an older, structurally weaker parent company, the brand’s growth story and the parent’s balance-sheet story are not the same story, and the second one, not the marketing metrics, tends to decide who ends up owning the company. Zunpulse can point to 100,000-plus homes and 50-plus SKUs; ZunRoof Tech Private Limited can point to three straight fiscal years without a profit and a controlling shareholder that was not in the founders’ original capitalisation table. Anyone reading a hardware brand’s growth numbers should ask a narrower question first: which legal entity’s accounts are actually being quoted, and who holds the majority of it today.

Frequently asked questions

Is Zunpulse a separate company from ZunRoof?

No. Both are brands run by the same legal entity, ZunRoof Tech Private Limited, and its financial filings cover the solar and smart-home businesses together, not Zunpulse alone (Entrackr; Tracxn).

Who owns Zunpulse today?

The Godrej family office, through its investment vehicle ANBG Enterprise LLP, holds a majority stake of more than 70% in ZunRoof Tech Private Limited as of September 2025, as reported by Entrackr citing data from TheKredible.

Is Zunpulse profitable?

No standalone figure is disclosed, but the parent entity has reported a net loss in every fiscal year on record, including ₹29.48 crore in FY23 and ₹14.24 crore in FY24, even as that loss has narrowed (Entrackr).

How much money has Zunpulse’s parent company raised?

ZunRoof Tech Private Limited has raised more than $15 million to date, mostly from the Godrej family office across rounds in 2019-20, March 2022, December 2024 and September 2025, alongside smaller angel and Intellecap Impact Investment Network cheques earlier on (Entrackr; The Better India).

What does Zunpulse actually sell?

More than 50 SKUs of IoT-enabled smart-home hardware, including smart plugs, bulbs, energy monitors, BLDC fans, video doorbells, cameras and locks, sold through its own app and website plus Amazon and Flipkart (Tracxn).

Sources

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

• The Better India, “IIT Kharagpur Grads Help 1 Lakh Homes Cut Power Bills by 40%,” December 2021
• Inc42 (Fast42), “They Built An INR 100 Cr Brand For India’s Smart Home Generation,” accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, Zunpulse company profile, accessed September 2026
• Entrackr, “Zunroof spent Rs 60 Cr to make Rs 30 Cr in FY23,” August 2023
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: Godrej increases stake in Zunroof with fresh investment,” December 2024
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: Zunroof secures fresh funds from Godrej,” September 2025
• SaurEnergy, “Solar Startup Zunroof Struggles To Deliver On Promise,” accessed September 2026
• Energetica India, “ZunRoof Enters Smart Homes Category with ‘zunpulse’ Range of Smart Devices,” September 2020
• Energetica India, “Pranesh Chaudhary, Founder & CEO at ZunRoof,” accessed September 2026

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