The first hundred Wakefit mattresses were carried to customers by the two founders themselves.
Ankit Garg is a chemical engineer from IIT Roorkee, by one profile, and it was a mattress, not a technology, that started it. He bought one in 2014 or 2015 (accounts differ) and was unhappy with both the price and how it suited his sleep. At the time he was working at Tapzo, where his colleague Chaitanya Ramalingegowda was also building. Over coffee, the two began talking about sleep as one of the three pillars of health, with food and exercise, and about how little attention Indians gave it.
Ankit Garg is a chemical engineer from IIT Roorkee, by one profile, and it was a mattress, not a technology, that started it.
Garg did not jump. In 2015, before any company existed, he bought a few hundred mattresses and sold them on Amazon to see what the numbers looked like. What almost nobody remembers about the brand's origin is how small the test was. One report says it made a profit of Rs 60 lakh, though that figure comes from a promotional source. The starting capital is murky as well: Rs 13 lakh in one telling, Rs 18 lakh of savings in another.
Wakefit was incorporated in March 2016. Garg was on his second startup and Ramalingegowda on his third, which may explain the caution. They sold memory-foam and orthopaedic mattresses online and, when the first orders came, delivered them personally to learn what was going wrong.
Money followed in steps. A Series A of about Rs 65 crore from Sequoia in December 2018, Rs 185 crore in 2020, Rs 200 crore in November 2021. COVID pushed them into beds, sofas and wardrobes. In 2022 they opened their own stores and a large plant at Hosur.
The cost showed up in the accounts. In FY23 revenue was Rs 813 crore but the net loss was Rs 146 crore. The turn arrived quietly: Rs 35 crore profit in FY25, then Rs 189 crore on Rs 1,489 crore revenue in FY26. The company listed on 15 December 2025 after a roughly Rs 1,289 crore issue, and the shares dropped 7% in May 2026 on margin worries from input inflation.
For a founder, the useful detail is how cheaply they asked the market a question. A few hundred mattresses and a few weeks of deliveries answered what a survey might not have. The pitch was real long before the pitch deck was.