Founder, POPxo; Co-founder, The Good Glamm Group; Founder, Coluxe | Founded 2013 | Delhi
A village in Punjab, and two boarding schools
Priyanka Gill was born in a small village in Punjab. At six she was sent to CJM Waverley, an all-girls boarding school, and she finished her schooling at VDJS in Hisar, another girls’ boarding school. Entrepreneur India described this in a 2022 profile. Years later, when she built a media company for young Indian women, a large share of her staff were women too. Inc42 reported in 2017 that 85% of POPxo’s team were female.
She went on to read English Literature at Lady Shri Ram College in Delhi, graduating in 2001. She credited LSR with teaching her to “think logically” and “write well,” she told HELLO! India in 2023. Both skills would matter more than she could have known.
London, and a blog for women far from home
The same year she graduated, she married and moved to London, where she worked as a freelance writer. “After graduating in 2001, I moved to London,” she told Entrepreneur India in 2025. Inc42 describes her as a King’s College graduate with roots in both the UK and India.
In June 2013 she and co-founder Namrata Bostrom launched Estylista, a fashion and lifestyle blog for Indian women living abroad. It began with the diaspora in mind, but it was soon aimed at young women in India itself.
POPxo, and the move home
In March 2014 the blog relaunched as POPxo, a site for young Indian women covering fashion, beauty, relationships and everyday life. Inc42 reported that it drew about 50,000 unique visitors in its first month and passed a million in its first six months. By October 2014 the team had grown to 15, mostly writers.
She moved the business, and herself, to where the readers were. Entrepreneur India dates her move back to 2014. Inc42 reported that POPxo moved its base to Delhi in January 2015. “We got very lucky because the timing was quite perfect,” she said later, Entrepreneur India reported.
Raising money was another matter. In one pitch meeting, Entrepreneur India reported, an investor asked why she wanted venture capital rather than asking her husband, a London-based trader, for the money. “Raising capital is hard, and for female entrepreneurs, it is harder,” she said.
She raised it anyway. Inc42 reported a seed round of about $465,000 (₹3 crore), with Rajan Anandan among the investors. Then came a $2 million Series A from Kalaari Capital and IDG Ventures, with 500 Startups participating. By April 2017 POPxo had raised about $5.5 million across three rounds.
The Hindi edition that stopped, then quietly started again
Early in 2015 POPxo launched a Hindi edition to reach readers beyond English. It did not take off. “Our focus got divided between the English and Hindi versions and it did not take off the way we expected it to,” she told Inc42. The Hindi site had not been updated since April 2016.
She did not drop the idea. In an Inc42 question-and-answer session in September 2017, she said the company had “stopped publishing new content for POPxo Hindi,” but had now “literally restarted in a stealth mode.” The team had hired “a small Hindi team again,” she said, and was “beginning to take on the vernacular languages.”
By then POPxo was large. Inc42 reported 9.5 million unique users in July 2017, with around 10 million monthly site visits and 1.6 billion monthly social media impressions. The company had 102 employees, including text and video teams of more than 30 each. Its app had passed 500,000 downloads. That year also brought a change at the top: co-founder Namrata Bostrom left the company in March 2017, Inc42 reported, leaving Gill to run it as founder and CEO.
Plixxo, merchandise and a hard 2020
In 2017 she launched Plixxo, an influencer marketing platform that connected brands with creators. “Recognising the rise of influencer marketing, I expanded into the space with Plixxo in 2017,” she told Entrepreneur India. POPxo also began selling its own merchandise, including mugs, laptop bags, pouches and tote bags.
The pandemic hit hard. Entrepreneur India reported in 2022 that the company furloughed staff and that investors gave it loans to get through.
The MyGlamm merger and a unicorn
The turn came from Darpan Sanghvi, founder of the beauty brand MyGlamm. He approached her with an idea of turning content into commerce: use POPxo’s audience to sell MyGlamm’s products. “That was the turning point for MyGlamm and POPxo,” she told Entrepreneur India. In August 2020 MyGlamm acquired POPxo.
The results came quickly. Before the deal, POPxo was bringing in about 30,000 new customers a month. A month after, that number doubled, and by 2022 it was more than 400,000 a month. Entrepreneur India reported that the group’s brands were reaching more than 10,000 pin codes, and that it was running at about $150 million in annual revenue, with a target of $250 million by March 2022. For a company that had started as a blog, it was a very different scale of business. MyGlamm then bought more media and creator businesses and became The Good Glamm Group. Gill was named a co-founder, alongside Sanghvi and BabyChakra founder Naiyya Saggi. In November 2021 the group raised $150 million in a Series D round led by Prosus Ventures and Warburg Pincus. Entrepreneur India reported that this made it India’s first beauty commerce unicorn. Plixxo was folded into a new creator business, Good Creator Co, in January 2022.
“I think I would never have imagined reaching where we are today,” she said in 2022. By April 2023, HELLO! India reported, the group’s media platforms reached about 215 million monthly active users.
After Good Glamm
The years that followed were harder for the group. In February 2025 Outlook Business reported cash-flow problems, delayed salaries, about 150 layoffs and board exits by Accel, Bessemer and Prosus at a company once valued at $1.2 billion. It also reported that Gill had left.
By then she had already started again. In January 2025 she founded Coluxe, a lab-grown diamond jewellery brand, as founder and CEO. Exchange4media reported that she stepped down as a venture partner at Kalaari Capital, a role she had taken up only that January. Entrepreneur India reported in April 2025 that Coluxe had raised an angel round from friends and family and was in talks with venture capital firms. It also reported that 95% of its workforce were women.
“Women entrepreneurs still face biases when raising capital,” she said. A dozen years after a London fashion blog for Indian women abroad, she was back where she started: a founder, raising money for something new.
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.
Cover photo: supplied to Sakhi Sangini.
Sources: Entrepreneur India (March 2022; 2022; April 2025); Inc42 (July 2017; September 2017); HELLO! India (April 2023); Outlook Business (February 2025); Exchange4media (February 2025); YourStory (January 2022).
