"I left Kotak on March 31 and on April 1, I was in the process of incorporating the company," Falguni Nayar told Business Today. After eighteen years in investment banking she was about to turn fifty, and she had no job to go back to.
She was no stranger to hard work or to leaving places. A commerce graduate from Sydenham College in Mumbai, she went on to IIM Ahmedabad and joined Kotak in 1993. She helped set up the group's offices in London and New York, and her husband moved with her. By one account she sometimes came home at 2 am and flew out again at 7. What she wanted, she has said, was to run her own business before turning 50, because she knew building one takes time. She had spent years watching entrepreneurs from the other side of the table and wanted to be one.
She helped set up the group's offices in London and New York, and her husband moved with her.
Not everyone cheered. In a Film Companion interview, she recalled that people around her were doubtful, and she has said she was quite scared about quitting. The early money was family money. The certificate of incorporation is dated 24 April 2012, and commercial operations began in 2013. The memorandum shows how small it was: 10,000 shares, with 9,998 held by Falguni and one each by Om Prakash Nayar and Rashmi Mehta. The first office was a house on Carmichael Road in Mumbai, before a move to Lower Parel that September. In December 2012 her husband Sanjay was allotted 209,998 shares and she took 200,000. Until May 2016 the only shareholders, apart from employees exercising options, were the Nayars and those two other signatories. The first options went to Vijay Gaddamanugu in 2014, and the first outside investors, among them Harindarpal Banga, Narotam Sekhsaria and Mala Gaonkar, bought in a private placement on 18 May 2016.
What surprised the market was the order of things. A banker with no retail background bet on beauty, saying she saw Indian beauty consumption as being at a very early stage. She opened a first store at the Delhi airport in 2014, launched her own cosmetics brand in 2015, and added fashion in 2018. In 2019 Katrina Kaif launched Kay Beauty with the company.
Success brought scrutiny. A 2019 API flaw in Nykaa Fashion could have exposed accounts, and the company fixed it. After the November 2021 IPO, which raised ₹5,352 crore at about a $7.4 billion valuation, a 5:1 bonus issue drew criticism, CFO Arvind Agarwal resigned, and SEBI looked at the allotment. In FY25 Nykaa reported revenue of ₹7,950 crore and a thin net profit of ₹72 crore. Business Today notes it took about nine years to reach profitability.
She did not wait for a safe moment. Her lesson to a first-time founder is a date she gave herself, fifty, and the nerve to meet it, with family money on the line.