Founder and former CEO, LimeRoad | Founded 2012 | Gurugram
In the early 2010s, almost everyone in Indian e-commerce was chasing the same number: gross merchandise value, or GMV, the total value of goods sold on a platform. The quickest way to push it up was to discount, and most companies did. Suchi Mukherjee, who had spent the previous decade and a half inside some of the best-known consumer internet businesses in Britain, decided that LimeRoad would not play that game. It was a principled bet. Ten years later it also became part of a hard lesson about how difficult it is to stay independent in India’s online fashion market.
A Scholarship Out of India
Mukherjee has described herself as a middle-class girl who left India on a scholarship. “Seventeen years ago, I being a middle-class girl left India with a scholarship to study at Cambridge,” she told Entrepreneur India in 2016. She had graduated from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University. In 1994, BW Businessworld reported, she was the only Indian to receive the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust Scholarship for Economics. She then took a master’s degree in Finance and Economics at the London School of Economics as a British Chevening Scholar.
She stayed in the UK for about 17 years. Her early career was in finance. According to Entrepreneur India, she worked on teams that designed India’s first special purpose financing vehicle, and on a transatlantic merger that created the world’s largest aviation insurance company.
Seventeen Years Inside Consumer Technology
From finance she moved into the businesses that were reshaping how people lived online. At NTL, the British cable company that became Virgin Media, she led a restructuring of 1,300 people across 13 functional teams. She was part of the early eBay UK team. At Skype she sat on the executive management team and oversaw global product prioritisation, design, marketing and support, through several changes of CEO and the biggest product upgrade since Skype’s launch. She then became managing director of Gumtree, the UK online classifieds site.
By the time she started her own company, YourStory noted, she had spent nearly 18 years in top management at consumer technology businesses. She was also selected as one of 15 global women “Rising Talents, high potential leaders under 40”, Business Standard reported in 2014.
An Idea Found in a Magazine
The idea for LimeRoad came after the birth of her second child, in London. Business Standard (2015) and Entrepreneur India both describe the same moment: during a few minutes of personal time, she was flipping through a magazine and saw a piece of jewellery she wanted to touch and buy. Two things struck her. No consumer technology product made discovering beautiful things as easy and enjoyable as turning the pages of a magazine. And there was no single place to reach the vast range of products being made across South-East Asia.
In a 2014 interview with Business Standard, she gave a slightly different version: she had seen a dress in a magazine advertisement for a Bombay store and wondered why it wasn’t sold online. At the time she was planning to move back to India.
Her family was not convinced. When she said she would start a business in India, her mother replied with a single Bengali word, “sarvanash”, which roughly means ruin, Entrepreneur India reported.
Building LimeRoad
LimeRoad was registered as AM Marketplaces. Business Today reported in 2015 that it began in 2011 from investor Lightspeed’s Delhi office, with three co-founders: Mukherjee; Prashant Malik, an early Facebook engineer and co-creator of the Apache Cassandra database; and Ankush Mehra, who had run supply chain at Reliance Industries and Metro Cash & Carry. YourStory gives the founding date as October 2012, and the site formally launched in December 2012.
Investors backed her before there was a product. Avnish Bajaj of Matrix Partners told YourStory that Matrix invested in her as a founder before LimeRoad had a prototype, and before she had moved back to India. Lightspeed and Matrix put in $5 million of seed money. Mukherjee first built a tech team in Bengaluru and split her time between there and Delhi, then moved the whole team to Delhi. It moved with her.
The product was unusual. LimeRoad held no inventory: vendors owned the stock, and LimeRoad earned a commission when they sold. Users built “looks” on a virtual scrapbook, combining clothes, jewellery and shoes from different sellers, and others could buy the whole look. Scrapbookers earned when people bought from their looks. Much of the curation came from the community itself, which Mukherjee saw as the engine of engagement and of cheap growth. She called LimeRoad “India’s first social visual web platform”, Business Standard reported.
The Discount She Refused to Fund
While rivals bought growth with heavy discounts, Mukherjee held back. “If your headline target is to grow GMV, you will start doing things detrimental to building a great product,” she told Business Standard in 2014. The paper reported that LimeRoad wasn’t comfortable sharing its GMV at all.
Her objection to discounting was about the customer as much as the margin. “We don’t want Meena to buy because we are giving her a 50 per cent discount,” she said in the same interview. “Once a user buys on a discount, she’ll never buy for a full price.”
Later, in an interview with Fortune India, she put it even more plainly: “I’ve never funded a discount on any product.” She described LimeRoad as being “in the business of dopamine”, meaning that what mattered was which products made customers happy.
Investors were comfortable with the approach. Tiger Global led a $15 million Series B in 2014 and a $30 million Series C in 2015, with Lightspeed and Matrix joining both rounds. That took LimeRoad’s total funding past $50 million. Announcing the Series C, Mukherjee said the company had grown GMV 600% in the previous 12 months, and that 80–85% of orders came from organic traffic. Business Today reported that customers returned to the app 85 times a year on average. In January 2016 she was on stage with Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Startup India–Stand Up India launch, the only woman e-commerce founder there, BW Businessworld reported.
Growing Up, and Getting Squeezed
The company did grow. Its head office in Gurugram went from 30 people to about 650, according to Fortune India. LimeRoad added menswear and kidswear, launched an India Design Cell for young designers, and opened an offline store in Gujarat. In March 2018, BW Businessworld described a company that was “obsessed with profitability” rather than turnover. Mukherjee told Fortune India that she expected the profit and loss statement to show a profit by the third quarter of that year.
Revenue reached ₹179.95 crore in FY20. Then the market turned against vertical players. Business Today reported in 2022 that the big marketplaces (Myntra, Ajio, Flipkart and Amazon Fashion) pulled further ahead. LimeRoad never gained real traction in menswear or kidswear, and moves into home and kitchen and into experiential stores did not reverse the slide. After a $1.5 million infusion in 2020, new funding dried up. Revenue fell to ₹79.64 crore in FY21 and ₹69.31 crore in FY22, Apparel Resources reported.
Sold to V-Mart
In October 2022, V-Mart Retail, a listed value-fashion chain with about 410 stores, agreed to buy the LimeRoad business for ₹31.12 crore in cash, through a business transfer from AM Marketplaces. V-Mart also committed to invest ₹150 crore to scale it. Business Today pointed out that the price was less than a tenth of the roughly ₹350 crore LimeRoad had raised. Apparel Resources called it a distress sale.
LimeRoad continued as an independent unit, and Mukherjee joined V-Mart’s leadership team as CEO of LimeRoad and its omnichannel business. “V-Mart is a leader in the price meets quality space,” she said at the time. She told TICE News in 2024 that the merger “laid the groundwork for making LimeRoad truly omnichannel”. It also led to LimeRoad’s first branded store, in Hubballi.
Where Things Stand Now
Mukherjee resigned as CEO of LimeRoad with effect from 16 May 2024, according to V-Mart’s stock exchange filing. In her resignation letter she pointed to the division’s progress on growth and profitability and said it was a good time to pursue her next opportunity. In September 2024, TICE News reported that she was preparing her next entrepreneurial venture, without giving details.
Inside V-Mart, LimeRoad has become a smaller and leaner business. V-Mart’s Q2 FY26 investor presentation showed LimeRoad’s loss down 53% year on year to ₹3.4 crore for the quarter, while its net merchandise value fell 32% to ₹19.2 crore.
LimeRoad did not survive as an independent company, and its scrapbook model proved costly to sustain against far bigger rivals. But the argument Mukherjee made in 2014, that a customer who learns to buy on discount will never pay full price again, is still one that every founder in Indian retail has to face.
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: Business Standard (June 2014; September 2015); YourStory (October 2014; December 2014; March 2015); Business Today (June 2015; October 2022); Entrepreneur India (April 2016); BW Businessworld (March 2017; March 2018); Fortune India (c. 2018); Apparel Resources (October 2022); ANI/NewsVoir (October 2022); V-Mart Retail NSE disclosure (May 2024); TICE News (September 2024); V-Mart Retail investor presentation, Q2 FY26 (November 2025).
