Beauty and personal care brand Sugar Cosmetics, on Saturday announced that Bollywood actor Ranveer Singh has invested an undisclosed amount in his personal capacity in the startup, marking his first startup investment.
With this partnership, Sugar Cosmetics, which is run by Vellvette Lifestyle Pvt Ltd, hopes to create new pathways for customer acquisition, especially with the Gen Z and millennial audiences in India.
The investment in Sugar by Singh, 83 and Padmavat movie fame actor, comes on the heels of the cosmetics brand raising $50 million in Series D funding led by US-based private equity fund L Catterton. Existing backers- A91 Partners, Elevation Capital and India Quotient also participated in the mop-up in June.
“We are delighted to have Ranveer on board as we look forward to reinforcing our brand connect with consumers. He is undoubtedly one of the most popular youth icons in the country and his unstoppable and clutter-breaking personality fits very well with the brand ethos of Sugar. This will help supercharge our growth trajectory as we continue scaling Sugar aggressively to build it into a large and much-loved makeup & beauty brand," said Kaushik Mukherjee, co-founder and COO, Sugar Cosmetics.
Earlier this year, the direct-to-consumer beauty brand raised $21 million in its Series C round led by Elevation Capital (formerly SAIF Partners) in February. The Mumbai-based cosmetic brand had also bagged $2 million in a debt round led by venture debt firm Stride Ventures in October last year.
Founded in 2015 by Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad (IIM-A) alumni Vineeta Singh and Kaushik Mukherjee, the firm sells a range of coloured cosmetics such as lip colours and eye makeup both online as well as offline.
Sugar Cosmetics claims that the brand has a physical presence with more than 45,000 retail touch points across over 550 cities. The company clocks annual sales of more than Rs 550 crore and has more than quadrupled sales over the past three years, it said in a statement.
Over the past several months, fundraising activity has increased significantly in the beauty and personal care segment currently estimated at $26.8 billion, according to a report by Invest India. The market is expected to grow to $37.2 billion by 2025, the report said.
Besides Sugar, other brands in the fray are Nykaa, MyGlamm, Purplle, Wow Skin Science and Elle18, among others.
