The company now valued at over a billion dollars for selling lipstick was, at first, an idea about furniture. Three friends, Manish Taneja, Rahul Dash and Suyash Katyayani, set out more than a decade ago to build a furniture brand. They ended up in beauty.
Taneja, by one account, never planned to be an entrepreneur. As a schoolboy at Modern Vidya Niketan in Faridabad he was curious how things worked, according to a Financial Express profile. He went to IIT Delhi, and Purplle was reportedly his second startup. Dash studied at IIT Kharagpur and IIM Ahmedabad, Katyayani at IIT Kharagpur, and he became the company's CTO. Beyond that, the sources are thin: birthplaces, family money and the first-year struggle did not turn up, and I will not invent them.
As a schoolboy at Modern Vidya Niketan in Faridabad he was curious how things worked, according to a Financial Express profile.
What the record does show is the pivot. The idea moved from furniture to beauty, an aisle where Indian shoppers wanted choice and cared about authenticity. Purplle began, as many e-commerce firms did, as a marketplace. The turn came when it started holding its own inventory and building its own brands.
What almost nobody outside the industry sees is how expensive that decision is. In FY25, procurement costs rose 5.6 times to ₹671 crore because Purplle was now buying stock rather than just listing it. Losses were the cost of the switch. In FY24 the company spent ₹1.25 for every rupee of operating revenue and lost ₹124.1 crore.
Then the numbers turned. In FY25, operating revenue rose about 101% to roughly ₹1,367 crore, and the net loss fell 44% to ₹69.4 crore, with the cost per rupee earned dropping to ₹1.08. One outlet notes a one-time ₹20 crore non-compete fee sat inside that year. The company closed a ₹1,500 crore Series F round and became a unicorn, and reports point to an IPO filing around late 2026 with a valuation target near $1.25 billion. Nothing is filed yet.
The founders held about 15.6% as of September 2024, which is the quiet price of a decade of fundraising: three people who built the company own less than a sixth of it.
For someone starting up, the furniture detour is the point. Purplle's founders did not need the first idea to be right. They needed to be three people who could stay together while the idea changed shape under them, and who were willing to carry the cost of inventory when the easy marketplace model stopped working.