The Story
The Stack has raised ₹21.5 crore in a seed round co-led by Sauce, OTP Ventures and Huddle Ventures. OTP Ventures and Huddle Ventures also co-led the company's ₹5.5 crore pre-seed round in January, alongside a group of angel investors.
Shreya Jain and Kshitij Rihal founded the company in 2024. It operates as Stack Nutraceuticals Private Limited and is based in Goa. Rihal, who previously co-founded and scaled the mattress brand Flo, began looking into supplements while training for long-distance running and struggling to find products in India that matched what he had seen abroad. Jain is a chemical engineer with experience in pharmaceutical manufacturing, including antibiotics, and earlier founded a technology startup that was acqui-hired by Byju's.
The Stack makes supplements using clinically studied, globally sourced ingredients with transparent formulations, and keeps its range deliberately small. It sells five products across sleep and gut health: a magnesium bisglycinate sourced from Balchem in the US, a glycine supplement, a prebiotic fibre, a probiotic and the branded postbiotic EpiCor for immune support. They are listed at roughly ₹900 to ₹1,700 each, with combinations sold as stacks.
One in three customers places a second order within six months, and many pay upfront for six to 12 months through subscriptions. The top 10 percent of customers account for 30 percent of revenue, and the company says many new customers arrive through referrals and word of mouth. It says it has grown fivefold in six months and is targeting growth of six to seven times in FY27 over FY26. It has not disclosed revenue.
The money goes into hiring, research and development, and a wider product range.
Why It Matters
India's supplement shelves are crowded, and much of what sits on them looks alike: multivitamins promising energy, immunity blends with long ingredient lists, magnesium in whatever form is cheapest to make. The ingredient form, dose and source that decide whether a supplement does anything are rarely what gets marketed, and buyers usually have no way to tell one bottle from another.
The Stack's proposition is to make those details the product. Its magnesium is bisglycinate, a chelated form the brand says is better absorbed and gentler on digestion than cheap magnesium oxide, and it names the supplier. Its immune product uses EpiCor, a branded postbiotic sold by name. It makes five things rather than fifty, each aimed at a specific problem such as light, broken sleep or bloating. That approach built a generation of supplement brands in the United States, and it is still unusual in India.
The founders' backgrounds fit the pitch. Jain's experience in pharmaceutical manufacturing brings the kind of quality discipline the supplement category often lacks, and Rihal has already built a direct-to-consumer brand in mattresses, a category where trust and recommendations matter more than advertising.
There is also a regulatory reason the approach stands out. In India, supplements are regulated as food by FSSAI rather than as medicines, so they do not have to demonstrate in trials that they work before they are sold. Clinically studied ingredients and transparent labels are therefore a choice a brand makes, not a standard it must meet, and The Stack has built its identity on making that choice visible.
The Strategic Read
The retention figures are the heart of the case, and they reward a closer look. One in three customers reordering within six months is respectable for a young direct-to-consumer brand. But these are products meant to be taken every day, packed as 30 servings. A customer who finds that a sleep supplement works should be buying it every month, so a reorder rate below half over six months suggests that most buyers try it and do not continue. Upfront subscriptions blur the picture, because a customer who prepaid for six months will not show up as a reorder in that window. The more telling figure is that the top tenth of customers bring in 30 percent of revenue. That is a loyal core that has made the product a habit, and growing that core is the business.
The growth numbers are strong and come from a small base. Five times in six months and a target of six to seven times next year are the figures of a brand still finding its audience, and revenue has not been disclosed. A seed round roughly four times the size of the pre-seed nine months earlier suggests investors saw enough in the retention data to back it.
The harder question is defensibility. Transparency is a positioning, and positioning can be copied. Any brand can buy magnesium bisglycinate from the same supplier, print the source on its label and promise to avoid oxide. Larger competitors such as HealthKart, Wellbeing Nutrition and the Hindustan Unilever-backed OZiva have far bigger distribution and marketing budgets. What they cannot copy quickly is the trust The Stack builds with customers who stay, and the referrals those customers bring. Keeping the range small helps, because every product has to work for the brand's promise to hold.
That makes the planned wider range the thing to watch. Five products are easy to keep honest. A broader portfolio, one of the stated uses of this money, will test whether the same discipline holds as the brand reaches into categories where the evidence is thinner and the temptation to overclaim is greater.
For daily, sharp analysis of the biggest moves in the Indian business and startup ecosystem, follow StartupFox.
