Lenskart, Asia’s largest funded

Rocket rise

• Leaving behind leading eyewear brands like Titan and Lawrence and mayo, 15-year-old Lenskart is now Asia’s largest eyewear retailer with global investors like Temasek and Fidelity Management putting in big bucks behind the founder, Peyush Bansal. With this funding the company valuation stands at USD 5 million.
• The investment marks Temasek doubling down on its existing investment in Lenskart, while FMR joins the cap table.
• The company has also been making a few acquisitions to scale up its operations and get access to new technologies.
• Last year, it announced its acquisition of Tango Eye, an artificial intelligence-based computer vision startup, for an undisclosed sum. With this acquisition, Lenskart aims to utilise visual AI technology to enhance both the store and product experiences.
• After this transaction, Peyush Bansal-led Lenskart has attracted close to $1 billion in capital over the last 18 months, making it one of the largest growth-stage financings globally, the startup’s financial advisor, Avendus Capital, said in a statement.

Lenskart goes global and how

• Lenskart continues to deepen its penetration in India while rapidly scaling its international presence in Asia including in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
• The Delhi-NCR based startup reported impressive sales of INR 3,788 crore for the financial year 2022-23 (FY23), marking a 152% increase from INR 1,502.7 crore in the previous fiscal year.
• The company primarily generated 95% of its revenue from eyewear product sales. Additionally, Lenskart successfully reduced its net loss by 38%, down to INR 63.7 crore from INR 102.3 crore in the previous fiscal year.
• This fundraising comes at a challenging time for late-stage funding, as startups in this segment managed to raise only $314 million across 13 deals in April, reflecting a 50% decline.

The man who made Lenskart ‘Maruti’ of India

• Peeyush Bansal, Co-founder and chief people’s officer of Lenskart came to India literally with no business plan but kept exploring opportunities that would make significant impact and started working on student housing as a problem.
• He did it for a few years but it wasn’t big enough. Then he read articles about how India is the blind capital of the world and 75% of people who need glasses don’t wear them while 50-60% of India today needs glasses.
• Peeyush applied his expertise acquired in Microsoft and it has been a decade of never-look-back journey for Lenskart.
• The humble founder feels it will take another couple of decades to complete the transition.
• But, it definitely is one of those spaces where he can say he has found his own calling in terms of the impact he wanted to create on the lives of ordinary people.

Editor’s Note

Singapore state investment firm Temasek and US-based Fidelity have jointly infused $200 million into Lenskart, an omnichannel eyewear unicorn. The investment underscores Temasek’s increased commitment to Lenskart, while Fidelity Management & Research Company (FMR) makes its debut on the company’s cap table.