In 2018, Kae Capital wrote its first check into Nua, when the company was still a small, focused business built around a simple idea. At the time, sanitary pads in India came in exactly one size, no matter who was buying them. Ravi Ramachandran had built Nua around a fix for that: pads in three different sizes, delivered through a subscription, based on what a woman’s body actually needed.

Eight years on, Nua just closed a $50 million Series C led by Peak XV Partners and Filter Capital, and Kae took a partial exit as part of the round, realizing an 18x MOIC on our Fund II position.

Why we said yes early

For decades, femcare in India had not really changed. A handful of large, incumbent brands controlled the shelf, and very little of that time had gone into rethinking the product itself. A category that has gone that long without real innovation is usually one where a founder with a genuinely different, innovation first mindset can move quickly and take share from brands that have stopped bothering to improve. At the same time, more Indian consumers were moving online and were willing to try brands that did not live on a supermarket shelf, and a digital first company like Nua stood to benefit more than most from that shift.

What mattered most to us, though, was Ravi himself. He came in with a completely consumer first mindset, and a genuinely empathetic understanding of why a product like Nua needed to exist and how he intended to solve for it. A stale category, a real shift in consumer behavior already underway, and a founder who understood the problem from the customer’s side: that combination is usually what convinces us to write an early check.

From a subscription box to a real brand

By 2019, Nua had built a community of around 100,000 women, half of them in tier 2 and tier 3 cities, and raised a $4 million Series A led by Lightbox, with Kae participating alongside. That round told us something important: the demand was not just in the big metros where most D2C brands find their first customers. Women across the country wanted a better, more dignified option, and were willing to pay for it.

The next couple of years accelerated things further than any of us expected. Through the pandemic, as more shopping moved online and conversations about health became less hushed, Nua’s subscriber base grew nearly 90x. By mid 2021, the company had built a community of over 400,000 members and closed a $7.1 million round that brought in Lightbox again, and the Banga family office.

Profitable, and still growing

What stood out to us over the following years was not just growth, it was discipline. Nua crossed Rs 500 crore in annualized revenue while turning profitable, a combination that is genuinely rare in Indian D2C. This journey wasn’t without its fair share of hurdles. Full credit to Ravi, Abhishek and the team for ensuring that growth didn’t come at the cost of profitability and consumer centricity wasn’t lost in the midst. Nua used that base to fund real R&D and to expand carefully into maternity care, skincare, and intimate care, alongside its original period care line.

The brand Nua has become

Today Nua serves more than 3 million women and girls every month, across its own site, Amazon, Flipkart, and Zepto, and has built out digital products like a Period Tracker app and a community platform called SecretKeeper. Revenue has grown roughly fivefold in the last two years, and Peak XV has called it the fastest growing brand in its category and the second largest player online. None of that happens by accident. It happens because a founding team stayed close to a genuinely difficult, genuinely important problem for the better part of a decade, through several rounds, several strategy shifts, and a pandemic in the middle of it all.

A partial exit is a good moment to look back as much as forward. The Nua we backed in 2018 was a small business with a good idea and a lot left to prove. The Nua of 2026 is a category defining brand that three million women trust every month. We are glad to have backed that journey from the start. We are even more excited for the next chapter in this journey !

Congratulations to Ravi, Abhishek, and the entire Nua team. This one is a privilege to be part of.