In 2006 Vineeta Singh was an intern at Deutsche Bank, and the bank offered her a job paying ₹1 crore a year. She said no. She was twenty-three.
She had been born in Anand, Gujarat, in 1983, gone to Delhi Public School in R.K. Puram, then to IIT Madras for electrical engineering and IIM Ahmedabad for an MBA. The track was obvious. A crore a year at that age was the top of it. She stepped off.
She has said one investor would back the company only if her husband joined full-time, a condition she described as gender discrimination.
What almost nobody saw was what came next. Her first company, Quetzal, launched in 2007 to run background checks for recruiters, and it did not work. In 2012 she tried again with Fab-Bag, a subscription box of beauty products. Business Today has described three failed ventures in all before SUGAR. The sources do not say how those years felt, and I will not guess. What they establish is the arithmetic: one refused crore, then years of businesses that did not hold.
SUGAR came in 2015, with her husband, Kaushik Mukherjee, whom she married in 2011. Raising money was its own test. She has said one investor would back the company only if her husband joined full-time, a condition she described as gender discrimination. Later came a $50 million deal with L Catterton, and in 2022 actor Ranveer Singh invested.
The numbers show the fourth try working. Revenue rose from ₹127.8 crore in FY21 to ₹420 crore in FY23 and ₹505 crore in FY24. From 2021 she also became a familiar face as a judge on Shark Tank India, which gave a lipstick brand the reach no ad budget could.
Then the correction. In FY25 revenue fell around 18 to 20 percent, to about ₹404 to 415 crore depending on the source, and the net loss almost doubled to roughly ₹135 crore. Reports said the valuation had dropped from around ₹3,000 crore to about ₹500 crore, and the IPO she had said was two to three years away in early 2024 was pushed back by two years.
She is also a triathlete who finished the Ironman in Austria in 2017, which says something about her tolerance for long, slow pain.
The takeaway for a first-time founder is uncomfortable. The ₹1 crore she turned down is a famous detail, but the unglamorous ones matter more: two companies that failed before this one worked, and a brand that stumbled after it did. Founders rarely get one clean win. She seems to keep going through the interval between them.