Sirona Founder After Selling Its Company For ₹450 Crore Buys It Back | EXCLUSIVE Interview

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]A concerning developments there. Thanks very much for bringing us that update.

[00:00:04]But moving out on you know, at a time when D2C founders are rethinking scale, exits, and profitability, one founder has done something that it's almost unheard of. He sold his company for 450 crore rupees and then bought it back.

[00:00:18]Now on the sidelines of the TIE Delhi NCR India Innovation Day, Aishwarya Anand spoke to Deep Bajaj, the refounder of Sirona Hygiene, about rebuilding the brand after the Good Glam deal. Take a look.

[00:00:32]You sold Sirona to Good Glam for 450 crore, right? Which is one of the biggest D2C exits in femtech. Now, then you bought it back for 150 crore rupees.

[00:00:43]Now today you call yourself a refounder.

[00:00:46]Not just a founder, not CEO, but a refounder. That's a very deliberate word. So when you walked back in March 2025, what did you actually find? A brand or a wreckage?

[00:00:58]Wow, that's a loaded question. I think I found my people who were still at the helm of affairs.

[00:01:05]I saw I found a brand which uh which needed a little bit of attention again.

[00:01:10]Uh so I found my team and I found a brand that needed a little bit of attention. I won't say a wreckage.

[00:01:16]Uh but yes, I would say that it did need some work to bring it back to where it was during our peak era. You sold the company for a reason. Where did you think you made a mistake? Uh at the time when the deal came in, I thought customers were also going to also going to benefit a lot from the deal because Good Glam had a lot of distribution and traffic in terms of customers, our customers, PopXo, ScoopWhoop, MissMalini. These are watched by Sirona consumers. So they had the traffic and they had offline distribution. So I thought my consumers will win. So it was a check, you know, like a tick on that box. I also thought for the team members initially when we had built we had built on very little funding. Mhm. Uh and and Good Glam was a unicorn. I thought it was a great home for even team members because they would go to a very well-funded house.

[00:02:04]Um, and then for our investors, they were getting the early investors were getting a very good exit. So, I thought that fiduciary responsibility would also be taken care of. And as founders, you know, I I would like to believe that I'm a good zero to one one to 10 operator, and that journey was also coming to an end. And in the bargain, we would have also made some money. So, I thought it was a good deal. But but to answer your question on where do you do I think things went wrong? I think Darpan has also spoken about this publicly that I think they were trying to do a lot of things too fast too soon.

[00:02:33]>> We've seen Thrasio model fail and how?

[00:02:36]>> Everywhere. Correct. Correct.

[00:02:37]>> Right? The US-based Thrasio that absolutely crashed.

[00:02:41]India, where are the names now today? Yeah.

[00:02:44]There was a time when we would hear back-to-back Correct. funding stories, acquisition stories, but where does it exist? So, what's the fundamental problem that exists in a model like this? I think it was just that in you know, the assumption that operationally we'll be able to bring the back end for all the brands would come together.

[00:03:03]Um, I think that didn't happen at at at scale. And I also feel that the founder energy in in some of these brands was required to to continue with innovations, to continue with some of the basics that brought the brand that where they were. And I also think brands were yet to get matured for them to run on autopilot. Now, revenue was at 130 to 140 crore when you sold. Uh, it fell to 77 crores in FY25, which is nearly a 23% drop um, in 1 year.

[00:03:36]Now, you're claiming a run rate of 325 to 350 crore, and you're targeting 500 crores in the next 2 years. So, help me understand that it's nearly a 5x jump from the bottom. So, is that real revenue or GMV? Today, about 5 million women are on Sirona menstrual cups.

[00:03:53]While in 2017, we used to sell only 1,000 a year. We have just entered into menopause. We say that we are puberty to menopause journey for women. We have just entered into perimenopausal stage with with some of the products.

[00:04:04]That's a huge market waiting for for solutions. We have almost tripled in terms of from from what the revenue was then to now. Correct. Yeah. And that's why optimism towards 500 at least that will be the goalpost. Okay. So, you know, since it's like Sirona 2.0 for you right now, right?

[00:04:24]What is the kind of revamp we have seen in terms of your SKUs, the product line, the categories? Give us a sense of that.

[00:04:30]So, product-wise, if if we introduced period panties way back in 2022, today there are teens, so period panties for teens. Correct. If period panties are all white, we introduced colors to ensure that why they only white. So, at every product level we've gone it. So, product upgradation. Back then content used to be we had doctor-led content. We are adding more elements to it. We are going more research now that we talk about menopause and perimenopause in terms of uh team-wise, we are bringing in younger lot again who understands AI better than we do. So, trying to up that game. And in tech-wise again, we had launched India's first period tracker back then.

[00:05:08]We are we are reintroducing it. We had launched vending machines at at key locations. We are expanding that network. The panel that you're just talking about is called from Instagram to IPO, right?

[00:05:19]>> Yes. Now you have taken the acquisition route. You know how that ends.

[00:05:22][laughter] So, you know, what's the honest answer here?

[00:05:27]What's the honest answer here? Is Sirona building towards an IPO or is this a brand that eventually finds a better strategic alignment going forward? Also, what's your path to profitability going to look like? We believe within a next 1 year we'd hit at least break even that we are targeting. But we are investing right now on in in awareness. So, we might lose a little bit. Are we Are we looking to exit this time through through a strategic? Are we looking to IPO? I think right now we're just focusing on hitting our numbers in the next couple of years. Correct. And then we will see how well do we do it.

[00:06:00]Correct.

[00:06:00]>> To define what is going to be the next chapter. For that, uh help me understand, do you have enough money in the bank right now? Will you be looking at a fund raise? Well, I think uh do Do we need money to survive survive? I think no, that we've taken care of.

[00:06:14]Uh do we need money to uh do a few like blue sky gazing projects that I think will change the way FinTech is perceived in the country?

[00:06:23]With that, it is a wrap on this edition of Startup Street from Ritu and me.

[00:06:27]Goodbye and many thanks for watching.

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