The Man Who Sells India Its Nikes Just Backed an Indian Sneaker Brand

On Friday, Bengaluru-based Comet announced a ₹100 crore Series B led by Verlinvest, the Belgian investment firm built on the Anheuser-Busch InBev founding families’ money. Elevation Capital and Nexus Venture Partners, both already on the cap table, doubled down.

Then look at the angel list. Abhiraj Singh Bhal, who co-founded Urban Company. Ajit Mohan, global chief business officer at Snap. And Anand Ahuja — founder of Bhaane, and co-founder of VegNonVeg.

That last name is the one worth stopping on.

VegNonVeg is the most important sneaker retailer in this country. It is the shop that made buying a proper pair of Nikes or adidas in India feel like a cultural act rather than a transaction. Its co-founder has just put personal money into a homegrown brand whose entire proposition is that you might not need those imports at all.

That is not a portfolio decision. That is a read on where the market is going, from someone with better information than almost anyone.

The Round, in Numbers

Verlinvest is worth understanding. It is a family-office-backed evergreen investor rather than a conventional VC fund, which means it can hold positions far longer than a ten-year fund cycle allows. Its stated approach is backing founders at the inflection point where a strong challenger becomes a category leader.

Evergreen capital in a footwear brand matters more than the headline. Footwear is slow. Tooling takes a year. Stores take longer. A fund facing a return deadline pushes for growth that a shoe company cannot healthily deliver.

The Valuation Question

Comet did not disclose a valuation. Entrackr estimates it at around ₹535 crore — more than triple the roughly ₹167 crore post-money it carried after the 2024 Series A.

Set that against the filed financials. In FY25, Comet’s revenue rose nearly fourfold to ₹29 crore, while its loss widened to ₹4.39 crore. FY26 numbers have not been filed.

On FY25 revenue, ₹535 crore is roughly 18 times sales. That is a number that should make anyone pause.

The company’s own claim softens it considerably: Comet says revenue has grown ninefold since the Series A. If that holds, current run-rate revenue is materially higher than the last filed figure, and the multiple comes down to something more defensible.

K&B Take: We cannot verify the ninefold figure — it is a company statement, not a filing, and FY26 accounts are not public yet. Take the valuation as reported and the growth claim as claimed. Both things can be reported honestly without pretending one confirms the other.

Where the Money Is Going

Comet has named four uses: retail expansion, product development, technology capabilities, and R&D.

Two of those are real. Two are press release.

Stores. Comet expects to reach 10 by the end of this month and is targeting 20 by the end of FY27. Its stores are reportedly outperforming the broader athleisure category in the markets it operates in.

Sole tooling. This is where the interesting money goes. Comet currently sells four footwear models, each with its own sole tooling, and plans to double the range to eight by the end of 2027.

Founder Utkarsh Gupta has been explicit about the priority, telling Business Standard the company wants to invest deeply in sole technology, R&D and engineering — and that a model developed over a year specifically for women, with its own sole tooling, is about to launch.

A year. For one sole.

Why Sole Tooling Is the Actual Story

Most people reading a funding announcement will skim past “sole tooling” as jargon. It is the single most important phrase in the release.

Here is why. A sole mould is a large piece of machined steel. It costs a great deal, takes months to produce, and once made, it commits you. Change your mind about the geometry and you buy another one.

Which is precisely why almost nobody in Indian D2C footwear does it. As we found reporting on the Agra factory behind India’s new sneaker brands, the standard route is to pick an existing sole from a factory catalogue, put your upper on it, and ship. Fast, cheap, and it means your shoe shares its bottom half with a dozen competitors.

Owning your tooling is the opposite trade. Slow, expensive, and impossible to copy quickly.

Four models with four distinct soles, from a company founded in 2023, is a genuinely unusual amount of capital already sunk into the least visible part of a shoe. A ₹100 crore round that goes substantially into more of it is a company deciding to compete on product rather than marketing.

That is rare enough in this category to be worth saying plainly.

The Retail Bet We Said Was Risky

Two weeks ago, writing about Zaydn’s ₹6 crore seed, we noted that physical retail is the most expensive way to grow a footwear brand in India, and the place where a great many of them have quietly stalled.

Comet has just raised ₹100 crore to do exactly that.

Fair play — and worth engaging with honestly rather than restating the earlier position. The case for Comet’s approach is specific: its stores are reportedly outperforming the athleisure category around them, which is the only evidence that actually matters. Retail stalls brands when the stores underperform the cost of running them. If Comet’s do not, the objection weakens considerably.

Footwear also has a structural argument for physical space that apparel does not. Fit is unforgiving. Sizing varies between models. Returns on shoes bought online are brutal, and every return is margin gone. A store converts a browser at full price with no return risk.

Twenty stores by FY27 is still an aggressive number. It is also the bet a company makes when it thinks the product holds up in the hand — which, if you have spent a year on a single sole, is a reasonable thing to believe.

Comet Versus Zaydn: Two Opposite Strategies

Both raised inside three weeks. The comparison is instructive.

Neither is wrong. They are answers to different questions.

Zaydn raised roughly seven months of its own revenue to solve a working-capital problem. Comet raised enough to build a retail chain and a tooling library, and took on the valuation expectations that come with it.

The interesting divergence is manufacturing. Zaydn makes its own shoes but uses other people’s channels. Comet owns its designs and its stores but not its factories. Both have picked one hard thing to control and rented the rest.

Whoever gets to owning both first has something durable.

What This Means for Indian Sneaker Buyers

More stores, in more cities. Twenty by FY27 means Comet becomes a shop you can walk into rather than a website you gamble on. For footwear, that is a genuine improvement.

A women’s model with dedicated tooling. Most Indian sneaker brands serve women by shrinking a men’s last, which is why so much of it fits badly. A shoe engineered from the sole up for women is uncommon here and overdue.

Eight models instead of four. Range has been the limiting factor for domestic brands. You like the brand, you have already bought the one shoe they make well.

Prices probably hold. Comet sits in the mass-premium band, and neither Verlinvest’s evergreen structure nor a retail-led strategy creates the kind of margin pressure that forces repricing.

And the structural advantage remains what it always was. A shoe made and sold here sidesteps the import duty stack entirely — roughly 42% on footwear entering India, as we documented in the Hermès sneaker guide and again when pricing out what imported sneakers actually cost here. Every rupee a domestic brand does not spend on duty is a rupee available for a better sole.

For the wider context on what Indians actually pay for shoes, our report on why India’s biggest sneaker brand sells shoes for ₹683 remains the useful corrective.

The Verdict

₹100 crore is a lot of money for a three-year-old shoe company, and an 18x multiple on the last filed revenue is not a number to wave through.

But the two things Comet says it is spending on — stores and sole tooling — are the two most expensive, slowest, least fakeable things in footwear. You cannot growth-hack a steel mould. You cannot performance-market your way to a store that outperforms its neighbours.

If the money went into discounts and influencer seeding, this would be a different piece.

The tell remains the cap table. When the man who co-founded the shop that taught India to care about imported sneakers writes a personal cheque to a domestic brand, he is not making a bet on Comet’s marketing. He is making a bet that Indian buyers will soon choose an Indian shoe on the product alone.

We will find out over eight models and twenty stores whether he is right.

Key Takeaways

• Comet raised ₹100 crore in a Series B led by Verlinvest, announced 4 September 2026.
• Elevation Capital and Nexus Venture Partners participated; angels include VegNonVeg co-founder Anand Ahuja, Urban Company’s Abhiraj Singh Bhal and Snap’s Ajit Mohan.
• Entrackr estimates the valuation at around ₹535 crore, more than triple the post-Series A figure.
• FY25 revenue was ₹29 crore with a ₹4.39 crore loss; Comet claims ninefold growth since 2024, unverified pending FY26 filings.
• Money goes primarily into retail expansion and proprietary sole tooling — 10 stores this month, 20 by FY27.
• Comet runs four models each with its own sole tooling, doubling to eight by end-2027, including a women’s model built over a year.
• The round is roughly sixteen times Zaydn’s August seed, representing an opposite strategy: stores and tooling versus inventory and marketplaces.