It’s no secret that we thoroughly enjoy early-stage investing. Our portfolio founders will tell you that we are very highly involved partners: We help set up consumer insighting engines. Share best practices on consumer experience and building brand love. Help founders with GTM on D2C as well as marketplaces. We leverage our network of advisors and experts to help founders with bandwidth and expertise to solve challenges that range from NPD to accounting, from logistics to creative development. We get on marketing calls. We weigh in on hiring. We love product testing ☺
The fact is this is the time we can help a consumer business the most: fine-tuning strategy, helping with bench strength, navigating marketplaces, and providing the network early stage founders need. We’re here to support the people, and not just the business.
Fireside has been the first institutional investor in Mamaearth, boAt, The Sleep Company, Pilgrim, and Yoga Bar and it’s been our privilege to partner them as they’ve grown. It’s also been seven years since we raised our first fund, and the landscape has changed dramatically in this time.
What’s changed
The new-age brand ecosystem has come of age. The cost of starting up has dropped, and the ease, skyrocketed. Internet shoppers have ballooned and so have online sales channels – from D2C and marketplaces to new-age channels like social commerce, Qcomm, and ONDC. Consequently, founders are hitting the vaunted ₹ 1 Cr monthly revenue figure much earlier than before. This doesn’t necessarily imply product-market-fit that’s ready for scale.
Imagine you’re the founder of a consumer business – you’re making ₹15L each on Amazon and Flipkart, the same amount on a vertical marketplace, as well as on two q-comm channels. Combine that with your own website, and you’re at a monthly run rate of a crore.
But typically, that’s when we have seen multiple examples of progress beginning to stall. This is usually followed by struggles with unit economics, demonstration of PMF, and, of course, raising capital. This environment is the same for all players which has led to hyper-competition. Therefore, while the bar for early revenues has moved up, the bar for what is Product Market Fit has also been correspondingly elevated.
The Fireside perspective
At Fireside, we have a slightly different perspective on building consumer businesses in this environment. We believe that less is more.
We urge founders to narrow-band their vision to just one or two channels: say, your own website – for the sheer wealth of direct customer data – and one or two selected marketplaces. Across those two channels, focus on solving for the 5Rs: reviews, returns, repeats, ratings, and referrals (have to give credit to multiple founders for teaching me this – most importantly Vishal Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Gynoveda). This way, your efforts are relatively narrowly focused - leading to customer love, which is another way of describing PMF.
The orchestration of this consumer love happens through better understanding of the consumer (insighting), rapid NPD processes, and institutionalising customer success through amazing customer experience.
This combination, once proven in a couple of channels, can turbo-charge growth by simply being replicated on multiple other channels. Of course, each channel has their own playbook and nuance to growth, but that’s a blog for another day.
What we’re looking for
Our view of the consumer brand opportunity in India has only grown over the years. While population is more or less stable, India @ 2030 is going to be a vibrant consumer economy with GDP almost doubling from here. It will be composed of ~70M elite or affluent households looking for premium experiences, ~120M middle-class households looking for more value, and another ~150M households looking for better access. Cross-tab this with emerging consumer cohorts like wellness and active lifestyle seekers, fashion addicts, travelophiles, double-income single kids, silvers, etc. and it throws up opportunities for multiple consumer businesses to be created.
In 2025, yes, there are significantly more brands, but there are still many white spaces that exist – which can be filled by dozens, if not hundreds, of new brands.
So what we seek at the seed stage are founders or founding teams with a strong consumer insight into a market on the verge of large growth. We look forward to working alongside them, and co-build with them to help develop that insight into an enduring, valuable brand.
Here are some of the questions we think about.
Our seed investments
The Solved Skin: Founded by ex-Unilever duo, Divanshee Jindal and Abhishek Gupta, The Solved Skin delivers their vision of good skincare – simple, gentle, and effective.
Aukera: Founded by Lisa Mukhedkar and Kumar Saurabh, Aukera is a no-compromise grown diamond jewellery brand offering women choice of design as well as quality.
Tuco: Founded by sustainability evangelist, Aishvarya Murali, Tuco serves the much-neglected space of personal care for children and pre-teens.
Raaz: Founded by Akash Kumar and Dr. Harshit Kukreja, is a Bharat-focused men's reproductive health app offering doctor-led, evidence-based solutions in Indian languages.
Terractive: Founded by the sister duo of Raena Ambani and Rahee Ambani-Choksi, Terractive is a fabric innovation-led brand of activewear for today’s generation.
Beyond Appliances: Founded by commercial kitchen veterans, Eshwar Vikas and Rakesh Patil, Beyond is disrupting home kitchens through technology and deep consumer understanding.
Happi Planet: Founded by Mayank Gupta and Nimeet Dhokai, Happi Planet is reimagining home cleaning by making it safer and more sustainable.
Why talk to us?
We’re surrounded by founders who believe they can change the world, one product at a time. And we live in a time where such change is actually possible. We’re a fund that invests across every aspect of consumption – whether food, beauty, home, lifestyle, consumer health and wellness, or any other new-age product or service that can be consumed.
We’ve just entered our eighth year, having helped over 50 consumer companies scale - through our combination of focused playbooks, heavily networked ecosystem, network or advisors and experts, our inhouse Centre of Excellence team, and robust benchmarking. We believe we could be valuable partners in the earliest stages of your startup’s journey and share some of our experiences as we learn and co-build alongside you.
So, if you are building clean label spices, functional foods or better snacks... If you are building for Gen Z beauty or fashion... If you are building for Bharat and India 2... If you think kitchen, appliances or home improvement is the next frontier... If you think consumer healthcare needs to be re-imagined… And you’re relentless about serving a substantial niche of consumers, the answer’s always yes. Reach out, and let’s talk.
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