Long before Aarti Gill began building plant-based nutrition startup Oziva, wellness and fitness were already a big part of her life. At Indian Institute of Technology–Roorkee, it was through the choreography club. Even through the chaos of entrepreneurship, staying fit remained a priority. Gill continues to train regularly and can deadlift close to 100kg.
Gill’s husband and co-founder Mihir Gadani is a marathon runner. Together, the couple turned that deeply personal obsession into one of India’s most recognized nutrition startups.
In February, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) giant Hindustan Unilever Ltd (HUL) completed its acquisition of Zywie Ventures, the parent of Oziva, making it a wholly owned subsidiary. Oziva sells protein supplements, vitamins and functional health products focused on preventive healthcare.
But selling the company took some soul searching. “Honestly, it wasn’t an easy decision. I had my doubts about whether it was the right thing to do,” Gill says.
The timing wasn’t great either. Gill was preparing for motherhood, while weighing the future of a company she had spent nearly a decade building.
For startups building in the category, Oziva’s journey carries a more nuanced lesson. The company did not scale up like a typical venture-backed tech outfit. Growth came slowly, through years of educating consumers around protein, nutrition and preventive wellness. The business hit plateaus and pivoted along the way.
From struggling to raise a ₹10 lakh bank loan to eventually being acquired by one of India’s largest consumer goods companies, Oziva’s story is a tale of patience, category creation and the trade-offs between staying independent and scaling up with strategic capital.
In a candid conversation with Mint, Gill spoke about the realities of scaling a wellness startup in India, lessons from fundraising and the rationale behind the eventual sale to HUL.
The beginnings
Gill grew up in Chandigarh in a family filled with doctors and healthcare professionals. “I was just good at math,” she says, and ended up going to Indian Institute of Technology–Roorkee, in 2004. After graduating, she moved to Bengaluru and joined a startup in the intellectual property (IP) consulting domain. She later attended French business school INSEAD, at its France and Singapore campuses, and got a master’s degree.
A short stint with impact investment firm Elevar Equity proved to be the turning point for Gill. When she went to a location near Chennai to visit a portfolio company that was into affordable housing, instead of being intimidated by the chaos of operating on the ground, she found herself drawn to it. Watching the company being built up close made her realize she preferred that aspect far more than analysing spreadsheets. “I realized I loved getting my hands dirty and building something from scratch,” she said.
Gill set her sights on the health and wellness domain, where she believed she could combine both entrepreneurship and make a meaningful social impact. “Your body is the one thing that stays with you forever,” she says. Armed with that conviction, the budding entrepreneur began pitching ideas to investors in Singapore and raised a small amount of capital in 2013.
Gill’s original idea seemed overambitious: a digital wellness platform offering health consultations, nutrition guidance and marathon training online. This was at a time when Internet speeds were unreliable, video streaming was limited and consumer behaviour had not yet caught up with the vision.
“The business plan looked great on paper, but consumers weren’t ready for it yet,” Gill says. Still, the early consultations threw up deeper insights. Many users, especially women, were struggling with nutritional deficiencies, polycystic ovarian disease (PCOD) and thyroid-related issues.
Protein deficiency, now a mainstream conversation, was barely discussed in India then. The more the team worked with users, the clearer it became that wellness advice alone was not enough.
The pivot to Oziva
The couple decided to use the platform to recommend trusted supplements that users could add to their diets if they were unable to get adequate nutrition from food alone. But there was a problem. Many of the products available in the market did not meet the standards the founders were looking for.
Gill’s husband Gadani, a biotechnologist by training, would routinely reject products they reviewed. That sparked an idea: if the products were not good enough, why not create their own?
Between 2014 and 2015, the couple began to give shape to their idea, which would go on to become Oziva. The name was derived from jiva in Sanskrit, which means life and inner self, and ziv in Hebrew, which means radiance and brilliance. The company officially launched its first products in 2016.
The founders were deeply influenced by Ayurveda and traditional Indian ideas around food and wellness, but wanted to bring scientific standardization into the category.
Timing also played a crucial role. India’s digital ecosystem was beginning to evolve. Direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands were still a nascent concept, but content consumption online was rising rapidly. Oziva already had an advantage many early startups lacked: a captive audience from the recommendation platform it had built earlier. The first set of customers came directly from that cohort.
A slower journey
“I remember one of the questions that came up internally during meetings was whether this was only a product for the ‘avocado consumer’—a narrow, urban wellness audience—or whether it could eventually appeal to a much broader consumer base,” says Ashish Venkataramani, a partner at Eight Roads Ventures, an early investor in Oziva.
The covid-19 pandemic proved a game-changer. As consumers became sharply focused on immunity and preventive health, Oziva’s growth surged. By 2021, the company had about ₹80 crore in annual revenue. But once the pandemic-driven demand cooled, growth began to flatten.
For nearly two years, the founders struggled to understand why momentum had slowed. The market was still larger than it had been before covid, but it was no longer expanding at the same pace.
Gill and Gadani realized that being a single-category company in India’s wellness market limited their growth potential. Unlike the US, where brands can become big in one narrow segment, India demanded a broader playbook. Consumers were entering wellness for different needs, ranging from protein and fitness to skin, hair and hormonal health.
Oziva gradually expanded its catalogue to nearly 70–80 stock-keeping units (SKUs) across wellness segments. While this widened its portfolio, the growing complexity was becoming difficult to manage. So, the company aggressively cut dozens of low-performing SKUs and narrowed its focus to products that consumers repeatedly returned to.
“It sounds obvious now, but we had to uncomplicate the business. Most of our revenue started coming from the top 10 products,” says Gill.
Instead of chasing endless launches, Oziva focused on a core set of stronger categories while continuing to invest in product development and research. The clean-up helped unlock growth again.
“What the founders did well was recognize fairly quickly when something wasn’t resonating with their audience and pulling the plug. That discipline mattered,” Venkataramani noted.
It all came down to a handful of products. “Even at the time of our exit two months ago, 95% of our revenue came from nutrition products—what people consume every day,” says Gill.
On that front, there has been some angst. While Oziva has received many positive reviews on Google’s Play Store, several users have flagged issues around logistics and delayed deliveries after placing orders. Product feedback has been mixed. Some users said they did not see meaningful improvements even after months of use.
One user reviewing the company’s hair serum wrote that after six months, there was “no improvement in hair fall, growth or hair quality” and called it “a waste of money”. At the same time, many customers have praised Oziva’s protein powders and wellness products for being easy to consume, non-bloating and supportive of weight management goals.
But not everyone is convinced about the efficacy of supplements, plant-based or otherwise. People should understand that while supplements can support wellbeing, they cannot replace balanced diets, prescribed treatment or individualized medical nutrition therapy where clinically indicated, says Samiksha Chordiya, chief dietician at DPU Super Specialty Hospital, Pune. “The wellness industry often blurs distinctions [between dietary supplements, nutraceuticals and medical nutrition products] through aggressive marketing and simplified messaging,” she warns.
Consumers should be reasonably cautious because supplements are often perceived as harmless despite their potential risks when used incorrectly, says Chordiya. “Responsible supplementation should complement medical guidance, balanced dietary habits and lifestyle modifications rather than replace them,” she added.
Capital gains
For the founders, success had come after a rollercoaster ride—the early years of Oziva were defined by scarcity of capital. Gill and her team had initially raised ₹15–20 lakh for their first idea around digital wellness consultations. But the sharp pivot toward nutrition products within eight months made fundraising extremely difficult. “We had become the classic failed-entrepreneur story,” Gill says.
Investors struggled to understand the space, and few believed Indian consumers would consistently spend on supplements and nutrition products.
The founders then turned to banks for working capital. They visited more than 30 branches looking for loans and were rejected repeatedly. “Mihir had a Scooty, and we would go branch to branch getting turned away,” Gill recalls. Eventually, one branch of State Bank of India agreed to lend them ₹10 lakh. That money funded Oziva’s first batch of products.
For years after that, the company grew cautiously. Without raising significant institutional equity capital initially, Oziva scaled to roughly ₹25 crore in revenue.
As the wellness category began taking off, especially during and after covid, the company started raising capital to widen its portfolio, ramp up production and accelerate growth.
The research and development team develops the formulations, which are then tested at the National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories-accredited labs for nutrient profiling, heavy metals and toxicity. The products are made at good manufacturing practice-certified, US Food and Drug Administration-registered facilities of contract manufacturers, with a key unit located in Pune.
The products are primarily sold online, through the company’s app, website and e-commerce sites. They are also available offline in some speciality stores and pharmacy chains.
Eventually, Oziva may have had more funding than it needed, in Gill’s telling. Looking back, she feels the company could have done things differently. “Consumer brands don’t always need too much capital,” she says. “Too much capital brings pressure, dilution and timelines that may not always suit the natural pace of the business.”
Venture funding, Gill points out, comes with built-in expectations around exits within five to eight years. Unlike venture-backed software companies, consumer health brands compound slowly through trust, habit and repeat behaviour. “If you have investors willing to stay for 10 or 15 years, that changes the equation completely,” she adds.
Gill broadly sees three paths for consumer brands: staying profitable and scaling independently over a long period, going public after reaching meaningful scale, or partnering strategically with a larger company. For Oziva, the third route eventually felt like the most practical one. And, that’s where HUL came in.
Big deal
As Oziva scaled, the question was no longer just about growth, but about who could help build the business for the long term. The founders met with private equity firms, venture investors and large FMCG companies. “Growth in this category is not linear. You need somebody who understands the long-term opportunity,” says Gill. That partner turned out to be HUL.
The FMCG giant acquired a 51% stake in the company in December 2022 for about ₹264 crore, with the remainder to be acquired later, based on pre-agreed valuation terms. At the time, HUL was beginning to sharpen its focus on the health and wellness category. Under then chairman Sanjiv Mehta, the company had started building a broader thesis around preventive health, nutrition and better-for-you consumer products.
Globally, too, parent Unilever has been building a portfolio of wellness-led brands as consumer demand shifts toward functional nutrition and proactive healthcare.
In February, HUL completed the Oziva acquisition by buying the remaining 49% stake for ₹824 crore, and valuing the company at roughly ₹1,680 crore. While figures for fiscal year 2026 (FY26) are not available, Oziva was still in the red in FY25, but its losses had narrowed sharply to ₹4 crore.
HUL did not respond to Mint’s request for an interaction. The founders, meanwhile, have exited the company fully following the buyout.
“Wellness encompasses nutrition, healthcare and lifestyle. So, it is natural that incumbents in those spaces will want to protect their turf and acquire brands that have greater resonance to emerging consumer trends,” noted Madhur Singhal, managing partner, consumer and Internet, at Praxis Global Alliance.
Oziva’s rivals in the digital-first wellness space include Cosmix (over ₹50 crore turnover in FY25), Kapiva ( ₹342 crore revenue in FY25) and Wellbeing Nutrition ( ₹170 crore revenue in FY25), which target young consumers looking for cleaner labels and plant-based ingredients. Older direct-selling giants Amway Nutrilite and Herbalife also continue to remain influential in India’s supplements market, particularly in protein powders, vitamins and weight-management products.
For HUL, brands such as Oziva are a way to tap into a generation of consumers increasingly spending on supplements and preventive wellness. For Oziva, the partnership offered distribution scale, capital and the ability to build beyond a digitally native audience.
As Cyrus Vandrevala, co-founder of Intrepid Capital Partners and a global investor, put it, for D2C wellness brands, the moment a large FMCG partner becomes relevant is when growth is no longer constrained by demand or brand credibility, but by distribution depth, ingredient-sourcing complexity and operational leverage. “That is when scale must be unlocked without diluting the very standards that created trust in the first place.”
The acquisition also reflects a larger shift underway in India’s FMCG industry. Wellness is no longer a niche category and has joined the mainstream.
Gill and Gadani, meanwhile, have moved on to other things. Soon after the acquisition, they set up Giga Capital to back young startups, drawing on lessons from their own journey. But that hasn’t been nearly enough for Gill, who has been bitten by the startup bug again. She is thinking about building something in the health domain, from scratch. This time on a much larger scale.