I still have that first email exchange with Wakefit. September 10, 2017— a Sunday evening. Post a quick chat with Chaitanya, a few days back, I reached out to him again, requesting help to go deep into how Wakefit's product features and price point stacked up against the established players. The price differential they offered as an online-first brand was striking. Within a few hours, he replied, promising to share some data by Monday and proposing a discussion on Tuesday to unpack the drivers. We spoke, and the engagement continued for a couple more weeks. The founders were undeniably sharp. The business was sound. Customers loved the product. Yet, we couldn't bridge the gap to an investment.

Our hesitance was rooted in the market itself. The online mattress market size back then was barely ₹50 odd crores. It wasn’t very clear whether demand will shift online for an infrequently purchased category. At the same time, the marketplaces weren’t really investing in this category. Logistics for such bulky products was unproven; Amazon and Flipkart's infrastructure was tailored for small goods or large appliances.

Wakefit was undercutting legacy incumbents online by a significant 30-40%, and was achieving this profitably. But a critical question plagued us: Would these advantages hold when they inevitably had to move offline? We passed. So did every other investor. Wakefit never raised a seed round.

Eight years on from that very first email, Wakefit is getting listed as a public company today. It has been a journey defined by relentless metamorphosis. Wakefit has become not just India’s largest mattress brand, but also India's most loved and largest D2C home and furnishings company. We finally came on board as partners in 2023, a partnership forged through a combination of persistence and, perhaps, a touch of destiny.

Looking forward, we are very excited by the opportunity to build a generational company in this sector. We firmly believe that the founders, Ankit and Chaitanya, possess every ingredient necessary to make this a reality. Their meticulous attention to detail, fierce customer obsession, and boundless ambition are qualities we have witnessed time and time again, and we outline a few of the lessons this journey has taught us below.

Great Companies Reimagine Categories. They Don't Exploit Them.

On day zero, Wakefit took a call that defined everything else that followed: price the product 30-40% cheaper than incumbents. Anyone coming in with an exploitation mindset — "incumbents sell offline at this price, so I'll match it online" — would never make that choice. Wakefit did because they were reimagining the category, not exploiting an arbitrage.

Ankit had studied at IIT Roorkee, then worked at Bayer. He understood chemical costs. He knew the true COGS of a mattress and was baffled by the exorbitant multiple customers were forced to pay. It wasn't that legacy brands were wildly profitable; rather, the offline supply chain was burdened with inefficiency—bloated with middlemen, high inventory costs, and a terrible customer experience. The incumbents thought of themselves as manufacturers, and never invested in understanding the consumer to build a loved brand. This realization was the true genesis of the D2C model for Wakefit, long before the term was mainstream.

The founders came with a simple thesis: high-quality sleep products should not be a luxury in India. They focused relentlessly on the Indian middle class. People who wanted quality but couldn't justify ₹30,000 for a mattress. The D2C, online-first approach allowed them to radically increase affordability while simultaneously establishing a direct, unfiltered connection to consumer needs, bypassing the noise of distributors and retailers.

They were proven right, and the industry has been forced to follow.

Constant Innovation is the Name of the Game

From very early on, apart from focussing on creating a great product, Wakefit had to solve logistics in many ways to scale the business online. Roll packing as a technology was introduced to India for the first time by players like Wakefit. Mattresses are bulky and therefore shipping them is expensive. Roll-packing reduced volumetric weight by 80% and transformed the economics of the category. Suddenly, delivering the mattress wasn’t that different from other products and customer experience became significantly better than offline buying.

Within a few years, Wakefit had a 60%+ market share in online mattresses. The company was growing healthily and continued to remain profitable. They could have coasted, but they didn't. To unlock the next frontier for growth of this category online, solving for the trust barrier was critical. Wakefit took the bold call of introducing a completely new concept to the industry: a 100-day free trial. It was high-risk. What if returns hit 30%? They did it anyway because they were confident in their own product & it was the right thing for the customer. This has now become an industry standard.

And the product itself? When we first met them in 2017, they were on version 5 or 6 of their flagship orthopaedic memory foam mattress. By 2023, version 25. Still tweaking. Still listening to customer feedback. Still treating every complaint as a system failure to fix.

Then came furniture.

Ankit and Chaitanya saw the same problem statement in furniture that they'd seen in mattresses. Customers were overpaying. The market was dominated by imports on one side and manual, labor-intensive local processes on the other. They decided to apply the same playbook: vertical integration, and direct-to-consumer.

But, furniture turned out to be much harder. They set up a small, engineered wood factory first. Customers were buying, but the conversion costs were the same as those of inefficient manual factories, making it very hard to differentiate. That's when they realized: either they should shut this vertical down since it’ll be very hard to capture a large market share or if they were going to do this, they had to think like Toyota. Automate to world-class levels to drive significantly higher efficiency in the manufacturing process.

Ankit and Chaitanya chose the harder path and decided to go all-in and build India's largest automated furniture factory. ₹100+ crores in capex, committed on day one. This factory also took some time to get to the right utilisation levels to start becoming profitable, but was clearly the right long term answer, and the only way to solve the consumer pain-point in a scalable manner.

This is what building a generational company looks like. You don't rest on what got you here. You keep innovating because the mission demands it. And it needs a special kind of founding team, like Ankit and Chaitanya who are frugal in the way they do things but also extremely ambitious about what they want to achieve.

Vision Drives the Ability to Do Hard Things

Vision without execution is just dreaming. Lots of founders have ambitious visions. What separates the great ones is the willingness to do genuinely hard things to make that vision happen.

From its inception, Wakefit established in-house logistics—a capability no other D2C brand possesses, even today. For many years, Wakefit handled its own delivery, even for orders placed on Amazon and Flipkart. While outsourcing would have been simpler, they insisted on self-delivery as the sole means to control the end-to-end customer experience and capture proprietary consumer data for learning.

Similarly, in 2018, they made their first major capital expenditure: investing in a continuous foaming line. This decision was driven by the necessity of complete control over quality and cost, directly contradicting the prevailing conventional wisdom that D2C brands must remain asset-light.

Upon entering the furniture market, they recognized the inherent difficulty of the problem. Committing over 100 Cr in capex on Day 1 required extraordinary conviction. This conviction, however, came at a cost: two years of burning cash to build core capabilities, and also a down-round.

Yet, the strategic payoff was significant. The combination of furniture and mattresses enabled meaningful expansion through Exclusive Brand Outlets (EBOs). Today, offline sales constitute 40% of their revenue, transforming the online mattress company into an omnichannel home solutions brand. Across their three core focus categories—mattresses, furniture, and home furnishings—Wakefit has become a 100 Cr+ brand in each, a milestone no other company has previously achieved.

Crossing The Bridge

In April 2023, we finally crossed the bridge, and became partners. The nature of the conversation had fundamentally shifted. We were no longer evaluating a small online mattress company; instead, we were entering a partnership with the undisputed leader in online sleep products. At the same time, Wakefit was at Day 1 of its journey of becoming India’s largest home and furnishings brand, an opportunity that is 10X larger, and that vision excited us.

When we dug into the numbers in 2023, one thing stood out. Wakefit had been built on a solid organic flywheel.

As an outcome of this flywheel, Wakefit was scaling at 25%+ annual growth rate with <10% of revenue spent on performance marketing. That felt like a real enduring brand.

When we sent the term sheet, Mukul's note to Ankit and Chaitanya said: "After years of knowing you and coming close to partnering in the past, we are really excited that this is finally happening."

Ankit's response: "+1 Mukul & Chirag :)"

We broke our own rules for this deal. Wakefit was the most late-stage consumer brand we had ever backed. Our sweet spot is earlier. We like to be there when things are still messy. But some founders are worth making exceptions for. We had followed this company for six years. We knew them. It was a relationship that had been forming for a long time, waiting for the right moment to formalize.

Looking Ahead

As we look ahead, the scale of the opportunity before us is immense. Fueled by rising incomes, rapid urbanization, and a significant consumer migration toward organized, premium brands, the total addressable market is undergoing a dramatic expansion. What truly excites us is witnessing the strategic blueprint that so successfully built the mattress business now being applied to scale multiple other categories.

Wakefit has strategically transformed from a specialized 'mattress company' into a powerful, omnichannel "home solutions" platform. The foundational principle that propelled the mattress business—challenging the notion that quality must be a luxury—is now being universally applied across furniture, furnishings, kitchens, decor, and more. A customer who initially purchases a mattress or a TV unit is continuously drawn back for a dinner set, then wall art, and subsequently, the curtains.

On existing product lines, the iteration never stops, and on innovation, they are not standing still, with their bet on sleep tech with the Zense range and capturing higher-value customers with the Plus range.

The move into physical retail is arguably the most decisive and bold step. The market requiring a "touch and feel" experience is substantially larger than the purely online segment, and capturing it necessitates significant capital investment. Wakefit already operates a validated offline format and is currently refining two additional formats to ensure its value-driven proposition reaches every corner of India.

Full-stack vertical integration (R&D, manufacturing, logistics, installation) gives Wakefit a structural cost advantage over both unorganized players who lack scale and online/international competitors burdened by higher cost structures.

Knowing this team, the IPO is just another milestone. They've already moved on to what's next.

Congratulations, Ankit and Chaitanya. Congratulations, Team Wakefit. We are honored to be here for the IPO. The next chapter belongs to you.

For founders reading this: stay true to who you are. The right investors will come around. Maybe not in year one. Maybe not in year three. But if you keep building something real and if customers love your product and the economics work, the recognition will follow. We missed Wakefit in 2017 because we couldn't see past our frameworks. The founders didn't change. We had to.