Founder, Executive Chairperson and CEO, Nykaa | Founded 2012 | Mumbai
In April 2012, Falguni Nayar walked out of one of the most secure jobs in Indian finance. She had spent close to two decades at Kotak Mahindra and was Managing Director of its investment banking arm. She was 49. Her twins were in college. Most people in her position would have been planning a gentle slide towards retirement.
Instead, she started an online beauty store from her father’s office.
Nine years later, that store listed on the stock exchange, its value crossed ₹1 lakh crore on the first morning of trading, and Falguni became India’s richest self-made woman. This is the story of how she got there.
A Gujarati business household in Mumbai
Falguni was born in Mumbai on 19 February 1963, into a Gujarati family. Her father ran a small ball-bearings business, and her mother worked alongside him in it. Business was talked about at the dinner table. Her brother went on to become a doctor.
In interviews, she has credited her father with raising both children the same way, with the same expectations, and with teaching her to be comfortable walking into a room full of strangers and starting a conversation. “Power comes naturally to me. I come from a family of high-achievers,” she told Outlook Business in 2015.
She studied commerce at Sydenham College in Mumbai, then joined IIM Ahmedabad for the two-year postgraduate programme from 1983 to 1985, majoring in finance. At IIM-A she met Sanjay Nayar, who would go on to become a well-known investment banker and private equity leader. They married in 1987.
Twenty years in banking
Her first job was as a management consultant at A.F. Ferguson & Co. One of the reports she wrote there, on India’s financial sector, caught the attention of a young banker named Uday Kotak. She joined Kotak in 1993.
The years that followed took her across three cities. She worked in Mumbai, London and New York, and helped set up Kotak’s institutional equities business abroad. She returned to India in 2001, and in 2005 she became Managing Director of Kotak Mahindra Capital, the group’s investment banking company, and a director of Kotak Securities. Under her leadership, Kotak became one of the leading bankers for Indian companies going public.
That detail matters to this story. For years, Falguni sat across the table from founders, studying their businesses, helping them raise money and take their companies to the stock market. She has said she was inspired by the entrepreneurs she met.
The question at 49
By 2012, Falguni had decided she wanted to build something of her own before she turned 50. She left Kotak in March, and founded FSN E-Commerce Ventures, the company behind Nykaa, in April.
The idea had been forming during her years abroad. In London and New York she had seen how beauty was sold in the West: large stores like Sephora and Ulta, with long shelves, hundreds of brands under one roof, and staff who explained what each product did. In India, beauty was still sold mostly through small neighbourhood shops, with limited choice and advice that depended on whichever brand the shopkeeper wanted to push.
“I saw the need for a multi-brand retail format that gives unbiased advice to consumers,” she told YourStory in 2014.
Not everyone understood the choice. People asked her why she had picked beauty, and not something that looked bigger, such as electronics or fashion. “I was not afraid to be different,” she later told Fortune. “But I wanted to do beauty. I stuck to it.”
She named the company Nykaa, from the Sanskrit nayika: an actress, a person in the spotlight. Uday Kotak supported her decision. Harsh Mariwala of Marico, a former client, urged her to think big, and later became an investor. The first money, though, came from the family itself.
Building it the hard way
Nykaa went live as a beta website in November 2012, and began marketing itself seriously in April 2013.
Falguni made an early decision that set Nykaa apart from most Indian e-commerce companies of that time. Rather than run a marketplace, where outside sellers list products and the platform takes a cut, Nykaa bought and held most of its own stock. “If you see it on the site, we have it in our warehouse,” she said in 2014. It was harder and slower, but it meant Nykaa could promise customers that what they received was genuine.
From the start, the site also tried to teach. It carried reviews, tips and how-to guides, a virtual makeover tool and expert advice. For many Indian women buying online for the first time, Nykaa became a place to learn about a product before buying it.
The early years were not easy. Many international beauty brands were pulling back from India when Nykaa started. Investors were sceptical of the category, and of a founder who was not raising large sums. “They thought the business was not valuable because I wasn’t raising billions of dollars from global investors,” she told Fortune in 2022. “But I did what was right from a business perspective at every step of the way.”
By 2015, Nykaa was selling around 30,000 products from more than 300 brands, from a modest office in Lower Parel, Mumbai.
From screen to shelf
Unusually for an internet company, Nykaa moved into physical retail early. Its first store opened in 2014 at Terminal 3 of Delhi’s international airport. In 2015, it launched its own label, Nykaa Cosmetics.
The years that followed brought one new line after another:
- 2018: Nykaa Fashion launched, taking the company beyond beauty
- 2019: Kay Beauty, with actor Katrina Kaif, and Masaba by Nykaa
- 2020: Nykaa Man, and the first Nykaa Fashion store, in Delhi
Investors who had once doubted the category came in. TPG Growth invested ₹100 crore in March 2019. In 2020, Steadview Capital invested at a valuation of about $1.2 billion. Nykaa had become a unicorn, widely reported as India’s first unicorn led by a woman.
Falguni’s children joined the business too. Her daughter Adwaita, a Yale and Harvard graduate, went on to lead Nykaa Fashion, and her son Anchit leads the beauty e-commerce business.
The morning of 10 November 2021
Nykaa’s IPO opened in late October 2021. The company was raising ₹5,352 crore at ₹1,125 per share. Investors bid for 82 times the shares on offer.
On 10 November, the shares opened 79% above the issue price. Within the first hour of trading, Nykaa was worth more than ₹1 lakh crore. By the close, the stock was up about 96%. Falguni, who held roughly half the company through family trusts and promoter entities, was suddenly worth around $6.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. She was India’s richest self-made woman, and Nykaa was the first woman-led unicorn in India to go public.
Her message that day was aimed at other women. “Women need to allow the spotlight of their lives to be on themselves,” she said. “I hope more women like me dare to dream for themselves.”
In April 2022, she was named EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2021 for India.
After the bell
Life as a listed company brought harder days. Through 2022 and 2023, several senior executives left, competitors such as Reliance’s Tira entered the market, early investors sold shares, and the stock fell well below its listing highs. A 5:1 bonus issue in late 2022 drew criticism and regulatory attention.
Nykaa kept growing through it. It continued to open stores, reaching 313 stores across 99 cities by March 2026, and according to its reported results for FY26, crossed $1 billion in annual revenue for the first time, with revenue of over ₹10,000 crore and a net profit of ₹204 crore.
Falguni remains Founder, Executive Chairperson and CEO. When asked about women and ambition, she tends to return to the same theme. “Women need to not feel guilty if they want to dream for themselves,” she told Fortune.
She started at 49, in her father’s office, with her own money and a category that many people dismissed. The rest of the story followed from that one decision.
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: Outlook Business (October 2015); YourStory (May 2014, November 2021); Fortune (November 2021, February 2022); The Week (March 2022); Business Standard (November 2021); IIM Ahmedabad archives; EY India (April 2022); TPG (March 2019); Indian Retailer (May 2026).
