The Story
Comet is raising ₹98.75 crore ($10.2 million) in a Series B round led by Verlinvest, according to a regulatory filing reported by Entrackr. The Bengaluru sneaker brand's board has approved issuing 70,618 Series B compulsorily convertible preference shares and 10 equity shares at ₹13,983 apiece.
Verlinvest, the Belgian evergreen investment firm backed by the founding families of Anheuser-Busch InBev, is putting in ₹61.73 crore. Existing investors Elevation Capital and Nexus Ventures are each contributing ₹17.90 crore. Urban Company co-founder Abhiraj Singh Bhal and Bhaane Retail are investing ₹50 lakh each, and Ajit Mohan ₹20 lakh.
Entrackr estimates the round values Comet at roughly ₹535 crore ($56 million), up 3.2 times from the ₹167 crore post-money it carried after its July 2024 Series A. That earlier round raised ₹42.3 crore at ₹8,445 a share, led by Elevation.
After allotment, Elevation and Nexus will each hold 19.72 percent, Verlinvest 9.48 percent, Bhal and Bhaane Retail 0.08 percent each, and Mohan 0.03 percent.
Utkarsh Gupta and Dishant Daryani started Comet in 2023, having worked between them at Hotstar and Urban Company. The brand sells India-designed sneakers and slides — the X Lows and Aeon lines, on a proprietary EVA sole with a wider toe box — at around ₹4,299, positioned between sub-₹2,000 local footwear and ₹10,000-plus global brands. It sold mainly through its own website early on and now also sells via Myntra and multi-brand sneaker stockists.
In FY25 Comet's revenue rose almost four times to ₹29 crore, with a loss of ₹4.39 crore. FY26 accounts have not been filed. The money is earmarked for working capital, capital expenditure and general corporate purposes.
A Moneycontrol report in March said Comet was in talks to raise ₹140-150 crore.
Why It Matters
Start with the number that is actually good. Comet lost ₹4.39 crore on ₹29 crore of revenue in FY25 while roughly quadrupling that revenue. A loss equal to about 15 percent of sales at that growth rate is unusual restraint in Indian D2C, where a fourfold jump is normally bought with marketing spend that dwarfs it. The founders have said they never had the budget for celebrity marketing and built demand through limited drops instead. The accounts back that up.
The product logic is coherent too. Comet sits deliberately in the gap between sub-₹2,000 local footwear with no aspirational value and ₹10,000-plus global brands most young Indians will not buy. At ₹4,299, on a sole designed for wider Indian feet, it is a specific answer to a specific gap rather than a general bet that sneakers are popular.
Verlinvest's arrival is the strongest signal in the filing. This is an evergreen firm rather than a fund with a clock on it. India is about a fifth of its global assets, it has backed 25 Indian consumer brands across fifteen years, and it exited Wakefit only last December. Sula, Epigamia, Blue Tokai: it knows how long a consumer brand takes to build and has the balance sheet to wait. Capital of that character arriving at a three-year-old shoe company is a vote on the category as much as on Comet.
Abhiraj Singh Bhal's small cheque is worth noting for a different reason. Daryani came out of Urban Company, which Bhal co-founded. This is not a random angel name on a cap table.
No one is telling stories through sneakers in India. — Utkarsh Gupta, co-founder, Comet
The Strategic Read
The headline number is the multiple. The more informative number is the gap.
In March, Moneycontrol reported Comet in talks for ₹140-150 crore. The filing lands at ₹98.75 crore, roughly a third less, six months later. Rounds get resized for all sorts of reasons and a 3.2 times step-up is still a step-up. But a company does not usually spend half a year in the market and come out with a third less than it went in for because demand was overwhelming.
Verlinvest's cheque tells the same story from the other side. The firm's Indian deals typically run $20 million to $100 million. This one is about $7.2 million for 9.48 percent. That is not a Verlinvest position so much as an option on one. It also leaves Elevation and Nexus each holding more than twice the lead investor's stake, which means the new money did not buy governance.
Then the valuation. ₹535 crore against ₹29 crore of FY25 revenue is roughly eighteen times sales for a loss-making footwear brand — a software multiple applied to a physical product with inventory, returns and a factory somewhere in the chain. It is defensible only on FY26 numbers nobody outside the company has seen. If revenue doubled again, the multiple falls near nine, which is merely expensive. The absence of filed FY26 accounts is doing a great deal of work here.
Dilution is the quieter issue. After allotment, three institutions hold about 49 percent between them, three years after founding. One more round on similar terms and the founders are running a company they no longer control, in a category where founder taste is most of the product.
The category question stays open. Gully Labs raised ₹30 crore in January and Neeman's has around $18 million, but nobody has yet shown that an Indian sneaker brand can hold a ₹4,000 price point at scale while Nike and Adidas discount onto the same shelf. Comet is the best-capitalised attempt at it. Eighteen times revenue assumes it is also the winning one.
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