Audiotech company boAt hopes to be India’s first D2C brand to IPO

boAt Lifestyle, which is one of India’s pioneer D2C brands and now the world’s fifth-largest wearable brand, hopes to become India’s first digital-first consumer brand to go public, its Co-founder Aman Gupta said at the launch event of YourStory’s Brands of India initiative to power the growth of India’s brand economy.

“I hope we are the first D2C brand [from India] to have its IPO come out,” said Aman Gupta, who is also the Chief Marketing Officer of the homegrown audio tech company, which was founded in 2016 by Aman and Sameer Mehta.

Speaking to YourStory Founder-CEO Shradha Sharma on recent media reports of boAt going public next year, Aman said while it is too soon to comment on it, he was surprised at the reaction of people to these reports.

“I was on a flight and was surprised when I saw the [IPO] news and started getting calls of congratulations. There was one leak or rumour somewhere but everybody followed the same story.”

Last week, several media reports claimed that boAt Lifestyle, which recorded a profit of Rs 48.5 crore on revenue of Rs 700.44 crore, plans to launch its IPO, looking to raise Rs 3,000-3,500 crore at a valuation of about $1.4 billion (about Rs 10,000 crore) between March and June next year.

“We hope we will be able to share some exciting news, especially [with] you [YourStory] very soon,” said Aman.

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boAt was launched with a goal to avoid another me-too sourced from China product “without having a clear vision on the design and Intellectual Property”. Today, it is present in more than 15,000 retail stores, clocking sales of over 10,000 units a day.

In the past year, it doubled its employee strength and established a local R&D centre in Bengaluru. The company has also expanded into newer categories like smartwatches, besides launching over 20 new products in the audio category in FY21.

In April 2021, it received Rs 50 crore in funding from Qualcomm Ventures, the investment arm of Qualcomm Incorporated, an industry leader in wireless technologies. Earlier this year, boAt raised approximately $100 million from an affiliate of Warburg Pincus, a leading global private equity fund focused on growth investing.

Brands of India is a YourStory initiative to catalyse the growth of India's D2C economy. The initiative will bring together D2C ecosystem stakeholders, including brand builders, D2C startups, investors, corporates, and policymakers, to discover, build and help daring entrepreneurs create an additional 500 Brands of India in the next three years. To know more about this initiative and the D2C ecosystem, visit brandsofindia.yourstory.com.