Innovist

Sauce wrote the very first institutional cheque, ₹2.5 Cr in July 2019 at an entry valuation of ₹25 Cr, backing a thesis that customisation of personal care products was the way forward; we had seen similar experiments in North America that convinced us. The founding team of Innovist is led by Rohit Chawla, who previously co-founded The Man Company, a successful men’s grooming start-up later sold to a strategic. Co-founder Sifat Khurana, an ex-Art Director at Ogilvy and a graduate of NIFT, and Vimal Bhola, who has a background in R&D at HUL and Johnson & Johnson, gave Rohit very complementary skill sets.

18 months in, Bare Anatomy looked like a failure. Revenue did not grow for months straight, customised haircare was turning out to be a supply chain nightmare, and on top of that Covid struck.

When Manu met the founders, it wasn’t the BPC market that excited him. It was the passion, intelligence, foresight and the strength of the team. In the context of a market that looked to be rapidly evolving, we chose to double down on the team, backing them when Covid made the future look uncertain.

Sauce stuck with the team through pivots, experiments and failed fundraises. The company evolved from customised haircare to a science-led house of brands in BPC, with every step in house. It struggled to raise at pre-Series A, through Covid and again at Series A; Sauce participated in all of them, and unfortunately couldn’t partner more. Other investors, internal and external, failed to support the company in its time of need.

That’s when, with the strong pivot, a resolve came over the company and the team: that they would build a business so robust they would never need to raise again. That statement stands true to this date. It is probably one of the only companies that needed to burn just ₹40 Cr to scale to ₹1,200Cr ARR with positive PAT, with everything built in house. This company exudes one thing above all: it isn’t over till you decide.

Eight rounds, five of them small seed bridges, one failed fundraise and one pivot. Sauce held every share throughout and kept buying more, becoming the largest external shareholder.

Sauce participated in every single funding round from Seed to Series B, a testament to the high-conviction, long-term partnership model. While other investors, existing and new, failed to support, Sauce stayed the course, found an alternate backer and continued backing the team. We have even tried our best to get as much as we could through secondaries.