Founder, Chairperson and CEO, Vu Televisions | Founded 2006 | Mumbai
In 2006, a 24-year-old in Mumbai set out to sell televisions in a market dominated by Sony, Samsung and LG. She had no plans to be the cheapest. She also had no plans to charge what the Japanese and Korean brands charged.
Devita Saraf’s company, Vu, would sit in the gap between them. By 2017, YourStory reported, Vu’s televisions were priced roughly 30% below market leaders Sony and Samsung, and roughly 20% above the Indian brand Videocon. Close to two decades later, Vu describes itself as the highest-selling Indian-owned TV brand in the world, still owned entirely by its founder, with no outside investors and no bank debt.
A daughter in a computer company
Devita grew up in South Bombay. Her father, Rajkumar (Raj) Saraf, founded Zenith Computers in the 1980s, one of the early Indian makers of personal computers and laptops. Her mother, Vijayrani, holds a postgraduate degree from the Delhi School of Economics, Business Today reported in 2015. She has an elder brother.
The family belonged to a conservative Marwari business community, YourStory noted, where a daughter working in her father’s company was seen as breaking a taboo. “Born and raised in South Bombay family, I always felt that the power and respect was with the men,” she told Khaleej Times in 2024.
She went to Queen Mary School and H.R. College of Commerce and Economics in Mumbai, and then earned an undergraduate business degree at the University of Southern California. She has since studied at the London School of Economics and Harvard Business School, according to her company and a PTI report in 2026. She is also a member of Mensa, the high-IQ society. As a schoolgirl, Business Today reported, she once chose to attend a Nasscom conference in Hyderabad instead of sitting a Class XI accounts exam on the same day. “I think of exams as an insult to my intelligence,” she told the magazine.
Learning the trade at Zenith
Devita began working at Zenith at 16, moving through different departments. From that age, she told Khaleej Times, she attended press conferences, dealer meetings, trade shows and office openings. At 21 she became Zenith’s director of marketing.
Unlike her classmates at USC, many of whom went into consulting, she wanted to run a company of her own, and saw her father’s business as the place to learn how. “You can never be an entrepreneur if you are always looking for a backup,” she told YourStory.
Her three years as marketing director brought her into contact with Microsoft and Intel, and she visited their innovation labs, Business Today reported. Meeting customers, she noticed something else: young, affluent Indians wanted a better lifestyle, and the electronics they were offered did not speak to them. “As a woman, what I understand very naturally is shopping. But the whole electronics industry was male-oriented and dull,” she said.
A pitch in the car
According to Business Today, a 2005 conversation with Jason Chen, then at Intel and later chairman and CEO of Acer, led to the idea of a product development lab focused on emerging markets and India. Devita wanted to combine that approach with ideas borrowed from hospitality, fashion and entertainment, and to put high technology and luxury together in a television.
She pitched the idea to her father during a car ride. He asked whether she would lead it as CEO. She agreed. She was 24.
Vu Technologies was incorporated in 2005, and the Vu brand launched in Mumbai in 2006. The company set up its new product development lab in California and Mumbai, and drew on Zenith’s existing infrastructure in its early years. Entrepreneur India reported in 2025 that she put in about ₹1 crore of her own money. She has said she coined the phrase “luxury in technology” in her original business plan.
Her timing was early. Vu entered the LCD television market when India sold only about three lakh such TVs a year, Entrepreneur India reported. “Initially, people couldn’t fathom that India would become a premium market, but I could see this seismic shift happening when I returned from California,” she told the magazine.
Holding the middle ground
The positioning was deliberate. Vu would not be a cheap alternative. “I realised that Indian businesses do not understand branding, except maybe luxury hotel brands,” she told YourStory in 2017. In 2015 she described Vu to Business Today as “a luxury technology company”, and an 85-inch Vu television priced at ₹9 lakh had sold out.
Yet the range also had to reach buyers who would never spend that much. By 2017, Vu sold 22 models priced from ₹9,500 to ₹3 lakh, roughly 30% below Sony and Samsung, and roughly 20% above Videocon, according to YourStory.
Holding that position was hard in physical stores. Large multi-brand retailers pushed their own private-label TVs, and margin demands rose from about 18% to nearly 30%, YourStory reported. Her marketing budget was tiny next to those of Sony, Samsung and LG.
There was a difficult chapter outside the business, too. In March 2013, the Securities and Exchange Board of India issued an interim order barring the promoters of Zenith Infotech, a listed Saraf family company, from the securities market over the use of funds from the sale of a division. Devita and Vu Technologies were among the six named. In its final order in March 2018, SEBI found inadequate evidence to implicate them, and disposed of the proceedings against both with no further directions.
Going online, and going big
By around 2014, Vu was doing about ₹30 crore in business when it began selling online, YourStory reported. Within a year, revenue reached ₹90 crore. In 2015–16 the company sold almost two lakh televisions and earned ₹275.8 crore.
Flipkart approached Vu about an exclusive online partnership in 2015. Devita took about four months to agree, YourStory reported. By early 2017, Flipkart said Vu accounted for 30 to 35% of its television sales and held about 4.5% of India’s TV market, and Vu had reached ₹400 crore in revenue for the year, against a target of ₹500 crore. By March 2018 the company had sold more than one million televisions, BW Businessworld reported, and was described as the largest-selling TV brand across Indian e-commerce.
According to the company, Vu crossed ₹1,000 crore in revenue in FY19, Inc42 reported in 2021. That year it also launched its own direct-to-consumer store. She was named by the Hurun Report in 2021 as the richest self-made woman in India under 40, according to her company.
Walking away from the 32-inch TV
Growth brought a choice. The 32-inch television was India’s volume segment, but it earned little. Devita decided to exit it, and wrote off about ₹200 crore of revenue. “This was the biggest financial decision we took in the last two years,” she told Business Today in 2024. Vu turned its focus to sets of 43 inches and above, 4K, QLED and Mini-LED models.
The decision shows up in the reported numbers. Business Today put Vu’s revenue at ₹660 crore in FY23, and Entrepreneur India reported ₹625 crore for FY24. The company itself continues to cite revenue of ₹1,000 crore and more than 40 lakh televisions sold, a figure repeated in a PTI report in June 2026. Outlets have not reconciled the two sets of figures, and Vu does not publish its accounts in detail.
What has not changed is the ownership. “With no bank debt or investor, I am profitable in every transaction,” she told Business Today in 2024. Vu has expanded into the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and parts of Africa, and in 2023 Devita made her debut on Business Today’s list of the Most Powerful Women in Business.
Where Vu stands now
Today Devita leads a team of about 300 people, according to PTI. She has spoken about a possible IPO but said she is in no hurry, and that she would rather work with one investor who understands the business than open its strategy to competitors. In June 2026 she appeared on the cover of Femina’s Power List, wearing a Hermès sari that her mother had bought in 2011, when Devita could not afford it herself.
Her stated ambition is for Vu to become a “young Sony”, and the world’s first luxury technology brand. Two decades after a pitch in her father’s car, she is still pricing her televisions in the space she chose at 24: above the cheap, below the giants, and on her own terms.
Founder Journeys is a Sakhi Sangini series telling the stories of women who built businesses in India. This story is based on public interviews and reporting.
Sources: Business Today (May 2015, December 2023, November 2024); YourStory (January 2017); BW Businessworld (March 2018); Inc42 (December 2021); Khaleej Times (August 2024); Entrepreneur India (March 2025); PTI via The Tribune (June 2026); Business Standard (March 2013); SEBI order (March 2018); Vu Televisions (company website).
