Falguni Nayar founded Nykaa in 2012 as a beauty, fashion, and wellness e-commerce company. It began as a purely digital shopping platform, but by 2015, the company saw so much success that Nayar opened 76 brick-and-mortar stores. The company kept growing exponentially, and by 2020, Nykaa retailed over 200,000 products across 2,000 brands.
Prior to Nykaa, Nayar held management positions for nearly two decades at Kotak Mahindra Group, a financial services group stationed in Mumbai. Looking for something different and more dynamic, Nayar departed the world of finance. She procured $2 million of her own funds to develop Nykaa from the ground up. In March of 2020, Nayar’s company raised $13 million in funding from Steadview Capital, pushing it to unicorn status with a value of $1.1 billion.
Stock value has increased 11x since its first round of funding, and the company is now valued at nearly $14 billion. Nayar’s personal worth now approaches $7 billion, making her India’s second-ever self-made female billionaire (the first being Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, a biotech entrepreneur), though Nayar’s wealth now considerably eclipses Mazumdar-Shaw’s.
Nykaa is a sanskrit word meaning “actress,” and the brand sources their brand ambassadors from Bollywood. The current brand ambassador is Janhvi Kapoor, a Hindi-language actress from Mumbai. Nykaa found an ardent following with Bollywood actresses and millennials, who were excited to find makeup specifically tailored to South Asian skin tones, rather than the imported caucasian-centric makeup that filled department store shelves.
Nayar graduated from India’s most prestigious business school, the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. She is currently one of India’s 20 richest people. In the Indian market, Nykaa is competing directly with Amazon and Walmart, which have extended their focus to include Indian e-commerce in recent years. With many products made in India, the company is quickly becoming a consumer favorite on the subcontinent.