Romita Mazumdar, born in Ranchi, graduated from UCLA, worked as an investment banker at Bank of America Merrill Lynch and as a VC at A91 Partners, before founding Foxtale in Mumbai in 2021. Today Foxtale has reached ₹250 crore in revenue run rate, raised $52 million in total funding, and built a community of 500,000-plus customers across India.
The Origin — From UCLA to Bank of America to 1,937 Consumer Interviews in 10 Indian Cities
• Romita Mazumdar grew up in Ranchi, Jharkhand, and pursued dual degrees in Business Economics and Financial Mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles. She secured a full-time role at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in Palo Alto in her third year of college, working in Technology Investment Banking and evaluating companies like Airbnb, Pinterest, and Fashion Nova.
• In 2018, when Flipkart was acquired by Walmart, the ripple reached Silicon Valley. Bank of America was expanding its tech banking vertical in India, and Romita came back. She later joined A91 Partners as a venture capital investor, evaluating growth-stage consumer startups.
• But returning to India also brought her face to face with a personal problem. Skincare products that had worked for her abroad irritated her skin in India. The country's heat, humidity, pollution, and diet had created a skin profile that global formulations were simply calibrated for something else entirely. Mainstream brands either priced themselves out of reach or chased trend ingredients without delivering real results for Indian concerns like acne and hyperpigmentation.
• Romita began researching. She worked undercover in a beauty store, spoke to over 3,000 women, and conducted 1,937 formal consumer interviews across 10 Indian cities. The finding was consistent: women wanted products that were safe, effective, and delivered results fast. "No one has four to six weeks to use a product and be motivated enough to keep using it to see results," she explains. That insight became the entire architecture of Foxtale.
The Strategic Genius — A Veteran Formulator Found on LinkedIn, and a Handshake That Launched Everything
• The boldest and most unconventional move Romita made in building Foxtale was finding Dr. Ramesh Surin Narayanan, a veteran formulator who had been the lead scientist on Fair and Lovely at Unilever and had also worked at Himalaya. She tracked him down on LinkedIn. He had 22 connections. She reached out to all 22. Three replied. And Dr. Surin agreed to work with her.
• "He's called the Fair and Lovely man in Unilever. He had 22 connects. I reached out to all 22 people. Three of them replied," Romita recalls. "Sir, you help me solve the formulation part. I'll help you solve the testing. And with that, we shook hands." The day Dr. Surin agreed was the day Romita handed in her resignation at A91 Partners.
• Foxtale launched in January 2022 with four products: a cleanser, Vitamin C serum, moisturiser, and sunscreen, all priced between ₹349 and ₹595. Every product was required to achieve 97% efficacy approval from the community before launch. The R&D lab is in Chennai. All formulations are done entirely in-house.
Scale, Numbers and Real-World Impact
• Foxtale has reached a revenue run rate of ₹250 crore and achieved nearly ₹200 crore in FY25 revenue. The company raised seed funding of ₹5.5 crore in August 2021 from CRED founder Kunal Shah and Kae Capital. A $4 million pre-Series A followed in June 2022 from Matrix Partners India and Kae Capital. A $18 million Series B in 2024 was led by Panthera Growth Partners, valuing Foxtale at ₹790 crore. A $30 million Series C in January 2025 came from Japan's KOSÉ Corporation, bringing total funding to $52 million. Romita holds a 34% stake.
• The brand has 500,000-plus customers, a 50% repeat purchase rate from the D2C website, over 5,000 Beautypreneur affiliates, and is available on Nykaa, Amazon, Flipkart, Blinkit, and Myntra, alongside offline retail in 10 cities including Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, and Ranchi. The company targets ₹700 crore GMV in 2025 and is eyeing profitability in 2026.
The Business Lesson — The Best Founders Are Power Users Who See What Everyone Else Has Stopped Noticing
• The sharpest lesson from Romita's journey is one she herself articulated during her years as a VC: "Founders can have operational experience, but where the founders themselves are power users of a category, they get what the consumer wants and care very deeply about it."
• Romita spent four years evaluating businesses before she built one. That experience gave her the financial rigour, the market reading, and the unit economics discipline that most founders take years to develop through costly mistakes. And her personal, lived frustration with the product category gave her something no spreadsheet could provide: genuine conviction about what the customer needed.
• "Every skin has its own story," she says. That belief drove 1,937 interviews, a formulator search across 22 LinkedIn connections, and a brand that now has half a million customers choosing it on repeat. From Ranchi to UCLA to a ₹790 crore valuation, Romita Mazumdar built the brand she could not find. And India's skin is better for it.
Sources: Founder Thesis, TheInspireSpy, YourStory / HerStory, Forbes India, Entrepreneur India, Free Press Journal
Show more
