The Story
Rotoris has raised ₹70 crore, about $7.4 million, in a Series A round led by Blume Ventures. 9Unicorns and Centricity participated, along with family offices including those of Diwakar Goel, Atul Singh and Adhiraj Burman, actor and television host Rannvijay Singha, and more than 30 founders, among them Mamaearth's Varun Alagh, Noise's Gaurav Khatri and Snitch's Siddharth Dungarwal. It follows a $3 million seed round co-led by Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath, Venture Catalysts and 100Unicorns.
Aakash Anand, who previously built the fragrance and personal care brand Bella Vita before exiting it, and Prerna Gupta, a founding partner of Wolfpack Labs, founded the company in 2025 with Anant Narula and Kunal Kapania, co-founders of Drink Free Advertising Media. Gupta leads the company, focusing on brand building and customer experience.
Rotoris sells limited, numbered watches through an invitation-only model built around what it calls the Registry, a permanent register of owners. Prospective buyers complete a profile and share information about themselves before a watch is allocated to them. Its founding collection of 2,100 numbered watches sold out within days of its launch in February 2026, sold directly and, the company says, without discounting. About one in five owners of that collection live outside India. Its collections include Manifesta, with natural stone dials, and Astonia, a Swiss-movement chronograph launched in September in titanium, carbon fibre and steel and limited to 2,175 pieces. The company says nearly 1 lakh people have since registered for access, with about 40 percent of demand coming from abroad, including the US, Dubai and Australia.
The watches are assembled and tested by hand at the company's atelier in Gurugram, using machinery from Switzerland and Swiss or Japanese movements depending on the collection. Rotoris says its assembly processes were set up with guidance from Swiss watchmaking specialists with experience at Patek Philippe, IWC and Tiffany & Co.
The money goes into research and development, expanding production and growing its physical presence in India and abroad, taking its Rotoris House stores from Delhi to Mumbai and New York.
"We are backing their vision to make an Indian brand shine amongst global icons, and the timing has never been better," said Karthik Reddy, co-founder and managing partner of Blume Ventures.
Why It Matters
India has built world-class consumer brands in many categories. Luxury watches has not been one of them. The category belongs to Swiss houses whose value rests on things a new company cannot buy: generations of history, in-house movements and an image built over decades. Indian buyers have mostly chosen between affordable domestic brands at one end and imported Swiss names at the other, with little in between that carried a sense of luxury.
Since Rotoris cannot manufacture heritage, it is building the signals of luxury it can control. Production is deliberately limited and every piece is numbered. Watches are allocated rather than simply sold, through a Registry that asks buyers to introduce themselves first. The founding collection was sold without discounts, which matters more than it sounds, because nothing erodes a luxury brand faster than a sale. These are the mechanics the most sought-after Swiss brands use to manage demand, applied by a company in its first year of selling.
The founders' backgrounds explain the emphasis. Aakash Anand built Bella Vita into a well-known fragrance brand by making premium products feel accessible and aspirational, and Rotoris is pitched at what he describes as ambitious consumers who see a watch as a reflection of what they have achieved. Nearly 1 lakh registrations, with about 40 percent of interest from abroad, suggest the positioning has landed, at least as a story people want to be part of.
The Strategic Read
The tension in this round is between two kinds of growth. Luxury brands grow slowly and on purpose: they ration supply, raise prices over time and turn most customers away, because scarcity is the product. Venture capital, even patient venture capital, expects revenue to compound quickly. Rotoris has nearly 1 lakh people registered and a current collection of 2,175 watches, so only about one registrant in every 46 could own one. That ratio is the brand's greatest asset, and growing revenue means changing it. More collections, larger runs or higher prices all add revenue, and each, pushed too far, erodes the scarcity that makes the registrations worth having.
Pricing is the other unknown. The announcements do not give prices, and without them it is hard to say where Rotoris sits, closer to accessible premium watches or to genuine luxury. That affects what the 2,100-watch sell-out means as a business, and how collectors will judge the brand.
So does where the value is made. The watches are assembled and finished in Gurugram, but the movements, the mechanisms that make a watch a watch, come from established Swiss and Japanese suppliers. That is how most young watch brands begin, and Rotoris's contribution is design, materials, finishing and the brand built around them. Serious collectors weigh movements heavily, and the research and development money in this round is where the company could start to change that over time.
Retail is the most expensive part of the plan. A Rotoris House in Mumbai is a natural next step for an Indian luxury brand. One in New York is a statement of ambition and a significant cost, in a city where the world's established watchmakers compete for the same buyers. With about 40 percent of demand coming from abroad, it is a logical bet. Whether an Indian name can command luxury prices in New York, and not only among Indian buyers abroad, is the question it will now have to answer.
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