An investor once told Aman Gupta and Sameer Mehta that he would put money in only if the two co-founders lived in the same city. They did not. They ran their company from different cities and, as they later told Entrepreneur India, held video calls even before the pandemic made that normal. They declined to move.
Aman is a Delhi-born chartered accountant with an MBA from the Indian School of Business, according to one profile that should be read with care. He worked at Citibank and KPMG, then at Harman International, the audio group behind JBL. Sameer came from a trading and supply-chain background that taught him procurement, factories and logistics. In 2013 they started Imagine Marketing, first distributing Apple accessories in India.
Fireside Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures and an affiliate of Warburg Pincus came in.
Distribution showed them something. Indian buyers had two choices: cheap, flimsy products or expensive global brands, and nothing sensible in between. The company launched boAt, starting with a charging cable. Early on, investors mostly passed, so the founders bootstrapped. Aman has described a business that forced them to be deliberate with spending.
The numbers made the case. Revenue was about ₹226 crore in FY19, ₹609 crore in FY20 and ₹1,314 crore in FY21. Fireside Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures and an affiliate of Warburg Pincus came in. The founders still hold more than half the company, which they say gives them the upper hand in decisions, and they brought in Vivek Gambhir, who had led Godrej, as CEO and reported to him.
Then Aman became a Shark on television and also an investor himself, with the pair backing about 50 startups. The lockdown, Aman said, gave the team the break it needed to think about what next. Sameer, for his part, flagged rising component prices and the push to depend less on China.
The price was paid later. Revenue slipped for two years running, to ₹3,073 crore in FY25, and the wearables line shrank 40 percent to ₹330.4 crore. The company still turned a net profit of ₹60 crore that year. The IPO was cut from ₹2,000 crore to ₹1,500 crore, and in March 2026 Aman stepped back from daily operations to start OffBeat Studios.
There is a founder lesson in that early investor condition. It sounded like a rule, but the founders say it was no longer necessary. Two people who split the work, one on the brand and one on the supply chain, built a company across two cities and still kept more than half of it.