Nykaa

Falguni Nayar founded Nykaa in 2012 after a long career in investment banking, building a beauty e-commerce business that listed in 2021 as one of the rare Indian consumer-tech unicorns to both go public and remain profitable at the operating level at the time of listing.

The decision to hold inventory rather than operate a pure marketplace was the central strategic choice: it traded gross margin for control over authenticity, a trade that mattered more in beauty — where counterfeit risk is high — than in horizontal e-commerce.

The 2021 IPO's reception — priced at a premium and holding value better than the 2021-22 cohort of Indian tech listings — was read as the market's reward for a unit-economics-first model, contrasting with the growth-at-all-cost framing of peers.

Nayar's status as one of very few woman founders of a listed Indian unicorn has been treated by observers as a structural rather than incidental fact, often linked to the brand's category choice (beauty) and to her operating model.

Critics compared the proposed valuation to the post-listing collapses of Zomato, Nykaa and Paytm — all of which had seen their share prices fall sharply after richly-priced debuts. The broader argument was that Mamaearth's DRHP was repeating the 2021 unicorn-IPO pattern that had already burned retail investors, despite a fundamentally different market mood in late 2022 and early 2023.

Advertising efficiency became the second flashpoint. Mamaearth reportedly spent about 40% of revenue on marketing with a Return on Advertising Spends (ROAS) of roughly 2.6, compared to Nykaa's 7.8 and Hindustan Unilever's 10.6. That gap raised the question of whether the brand's growth was sustainable without continued heavy ad-spend reinvestment — a structural challenge for D2C brands at scale.