Athleisure Brand BlissClub Raises Rs 160 Crore Led By Singularity AMC To Expand Retail Footprint
Athleisure brand BlissClub has raised 160 crore rupees led by Singularity AMC, with founder Minu Margeret and her partner Vidit Aatrey personally writing cheques, a round that closed meaningfully smaller than the 250 crore rupees the company was reportedly targeting months earlier.
Highlights:
- BlissClub has raised Rs 160 crore in a round led by Singularity AMC, with existing backers doubling down
- Founder Minu Margeret and her partner, Meesho CEO Vidit Aatrey, are investing significant personal capital
- The final round size came in well below the Rs 200 to 250 crore the company was reported to be targeting
- BlissClub narrowed its FY25 loss to Rs 20 crore from Rs 44 crore a year earlier
- The brand has now raised more than 180 crore rupees in total since its founding in 2020
Numbers reported while a deal is still coming together and numbers confirmed once it actually closes do not always match, and the gap between them, when it appears, is usually worth reading closely rather than glossing over.
BlissClub, the direct to consumer athleisure brand built around women’s activewear, has raised Rs 160 crore in a new funding round led by Singularity AMC, with founder Minu Margeret and her partner, Vidit Aatrey, investing significant personal capital in the round alongside existing backers Elevation Capital and Eight Roads Ventures, both of whom doubled down on their earlier positions.
That confirmed figure sits notably below what earlier reporting had suggested the company was pursuing. Multiple reports in the months leading up to this announcement described BlissClub as preparing to raise somewhere between Rs 200 and Rs 250 crore, at a valuation reportedly approaching Rs 750 crore, in what several outlets characterised as the brand’s largest funding round since 2022. The round that actually closed came in meaningfully smaller than that earlier reported target range, a gap worth noting honestly rather than treating the final Rs 160 crore figure as simply the natural conclusion of an unchanged plan.
“We believe active lifestyle apparel is increasingly becoming a staple of everyday wardrobes, and BlissClub’s deep product R&D and sourcing capabilities give us a unique right to win in this category,” said Minu Margeret, BlissClub’s founder. “This round allows us to double down on that vision, investing further in product innovation, expanding our offline presence, and bringing BlissClub to many more consumers across the country.”
The capital itself is earmarked for a fairly focused set of priorities, supporting the brand’s category expansion plans, fuelling its offline retail scale up, strengthening product development, and hiring specifically for what the company describes as its next stage of growth, a set of priorities that reads as a continuation of the offline expansion strategy the company had already signalled during earlier fundraising conversations, even if the ultimate cheque size landed smaller than initially floated.
“We have been very impressed with how the BlissClub team has thoughtfully built a strong brand and business in the fast growing categories of comfort wear and activewear in India,” said Sandeep Bapat, Co Chief Investment Officer at Singularity AMC. “This fundraise will enable the company to further expand across both offline and online channels.”
BlissClub’s own financial trajectory helps explain why investors remained genuinely interested even as the final round size shrank from earlier reported ambitions. The brand closed FY25 with revenue of Rs 135 crore, alongside a loss of Rs 20 crore, a significant improvement from Rs 92 crore in revenue and a considerably larger Rs 44 crore loss the year before. That combination, meaningful revenue growth paired with a sharply narrowing loss, is precisely the pattern investors have increasingly rewarded in India’s consumer startup landscape as pure top line growth alone has become a considerably harder sell than it once was. The brand had also reportedly crossed an annualised revenue run rate of Rs 250 crore around the time these funding conversations were taking place, a milestone that underpinned much of the earlier, larger round size being discussed.
Founded in 2020 by Minu Margeret, BlissClub began life as an online body positivity community before evolving into a full activewear and athleisure brand, building its early audience partly through community driven engagement efforts, including an attempt at a Limca Book of Records title for the largest online yoga class. The brand has since raised more than 180 crore rupees in total funding across multiple rounds since its founding, competing in a genuinely crowded Indian athleisure category against rivals including Cult.fit, Boldfit, and Cava.
One detail sitting quietly inside this announcement deserves acknowledgment rather than treatment as incidental colour. Margeret’s partner, Vidit Aatrey, is the founder and chief executive of Meesho, one of India’s largest ecommerce platforms, and his participation as a personal investor in this round, alongside Margeret’s own significant personal investment, signals a level of founder conviction in the business considerably beyond simply steering existing institutional capital toward it.
It is worth applying real scrutiny to what the gap between the reported target and the confirmed close actually suggests, rather than assuming it is meaningless noise from imprecise early reporting. Funding rounds shrink between initial term sheet discussions and final signing for a variety of reasons, valuation negotiations that do not fully resolve in the company’s favour, some previously interested investors declining to participate at the terms eventually settled on, or a deliberate decision by the company itself to raise less capital and accept more modest dilution rather than chase the larger, higher valuation figure initially floated. Without more specific disclosure from BlissClub on which of these dynamics actually played out, the most honest reading is simply that the round that closed is smaller than what was reported to be in discussion, a detail worth remembering the next time a headline number describes a deal still described as being in talks rather than one that has actually been signed.
There is also a fair question worth holding about how BlissClub’s offline retail ambitions play out against a broader Indian D2C landscape where several well funded consumer brands have discovered that physical retail expansion is considerably more capital intensive and operationally demanding than scaling an online only presence ever was. The company’s improving loss trajectory is genuinely encouraging, but funding a meaningful store rollout while continuing to narrow losses further will require real operational discipline over the next several quarters, discipline the company has shown real early evidence of, but has not yet had to sustain across a genuinely large physical retail footprint.
None of this diminishes the genuine substance behind this round. A brand that has grown revenue while cutting its losses nearly in half, retained the conviction of its existing institutional investors enough for them to double down, and drawn significant personal capital from its own founder and her well known partner, is a meaningfully different, more resilient story than a company simply chasing its next headline valuation number. Whether BlissClub converts this Rs 160 crore into the kind of disciplined offline expansion that finally tips the business into sustained profitability, or finds physical retail considerably harder to scale profitably than its online growth has been, is the question this round funds the company to spend the next year or two actually answering.
