Fireside’s 2026 Vision: Mapping The Course Of Consumer Retail, D2C Ecosystem

With its fourth fund closed last week, Fireside Ventures is looking at a new landscape of consumer brands and retail in India. 

The INR 2,265 Cr (around $253 Mn) fund IV will look to invest in 30-35 consumer brands — a tried and tested thesis that has resulted in exits over the past few years. 

For the firm’s founders Kanwaljit Singh and Kannan Sitaram this fund is not only a testament to Fireside’s success so far but also a sign of trust in India’s growing consumption economy. 

Consumption patterns, audiences, and channels are rapidly evolving across India, and Fireside is keenly eyeing the next phase of growth here. 

Founded in 2017, the VC firm has backed 60+ consumer brands with a combined AUM of INR 5,300 Cr. After raising a $225 Mn Fund III in 2023 and a $118 Mn Fund II in 2021 – supporting brands like The Sleep Company, Slurrp Farm, Sweet Karam Coffee and The Good Bug – Fireside is gearing up for the next phase of India’s consumption story, with a sharper focus on ESG and AI-driven consumer innovations.

In a recently published report, the VC firm said, “At Fireside, we see India’s 2030 consumer as a mosaic of identities: experimental, aspirational, proudly regional, and digitally native.” 

On the back of this new focus and a major stress on the environmental issues, Inc42 spoke to Fireside managing partner Singh and partner Sitaram to get an understanding of how this consumption drive is evolving.

While the broader thesis remains the same, there are some finer nuances in how Fireside is approaching consumer brand-building for a new India. 

One of the biggest focus areas for the fund is sports, fitness, wellness and lifestyle, which shows in its recent investments. Can we expect the D2C and retail ecosystem to move this way in 2026? 

Here are the edited excerpts

Inc42: Tell us about your latest investment in SFL (Sports For Life). Isn’t it different from the kind of investments Fireside has done so far? Does it open up a new sector for you altogether?

Kannan Sitaram: It is different indeed! So, we did a whole piece of research on what’s happening in consumption in new India. One of the things that stood out is that the sport and fitness space is booming. The trend is new but confirmed. And we think that a lot of discretionary spending has started happening there — whether it’s school kids or the adults, the number of Indians who are in a sport or go to the gym is increasing. It’s very different from what it was 10 years ago. So, when we saw that SFL was trying to organise this area, it became an area of interest for us. 

We are keeping an eye. Going forward, if there are interesting ideas, we would like to invest more in sports.

Inc42: Apart from sports, what does Fireside’s research suggest about other emerging sub-segments in consumer goods and brands?

Kannan Sitaram: Travel is another important emerging area. And we have already invested in Enchante Brands (Escape Plan) earlier this year, as it has found a very interesting way of brand making in the luggage market — via licensing.

Even the entire health and wellness area is increasingly growing more interesting. We had initially started with the wellness segment, which always had an overarching theme and included even beauty and personal care. One major example is Honasa and Mamaearth. Over the years, the wellness theme continued to shift more heavily toward the health side, which was accentuated by the Covid-19 pandemic. 

We turned to investing more in supplement brands. Starting from Kapiva and Wellbeing Nutrition to Traya, Gynoveda, and Ace Blend — the number of supplement companies we have backed is not a joke. 

Now, we are putting money into more serious health businesses like mental health platform Amaha and fertility monitoring device company Inito. So, we are looking for more DIY kinds of solutions in the health and wellness areas.

Kanwaljit Singh: Yes, health and wellness is an important area, but I would also like to put it this way. All the sectors, including fashion, beauty and personal care, food and beverages, have emerging opportunities with the purchasing power of GenZs and aspirations of small-town India becoming the same as the Metro cities.

Inc42: You just mentioned the health and wellness segment, but tell us a little more about the trickiness of investing in supplements and nutraceuticals.

Kannan Sitaram:  Well, in this space, we are very careful during the due diligence process. For example, when Traya came to us, saying it could help people bring back hair, it sounded almost impossible. And we talked to legacy companies who rubbished such possibilities.

But we started going deeper, spoke to consumers, heard their reviews and saw photographs of people where the transformation actually happened. 

What we also liked was that Traya was not putting out a few products on Amazon, it rather provided the promise as a solution where the entire process would help get back hair in four to five months. So, we saw the commitment to effective solutions, and that’s what we do with every company. We are not interested in fly-by-night operators. Since the time we came in, Traya has given a 60-70X run rate in the last three years or so.

Inc42: But you have invested in The Good Bug, too. Both GLP-1 and your portfolio company’s promises of helping with weight loss have been broadly debated. Does that concern you?

Kanwaljit Singh: Not at all. The Good Bug has found a probiotic, natural solution that creates the same GLP-1 impact. So, that is the disruption in a market which can be very exciting in the near future. 

Because of the independent clinical studies that we have done in double-blind randomised controlled trials, the results are quite astonishing, where The Good Bug is giving the same kind of outcome as the big boys like Ozempic, without side effects. So, it’s a positive. It can be the breakthrough in the clutter of other GLP-1s.

Editor’s Note: Inc42 has not verified the research or trials conducted by The Good Bug to test the product efficacy.

Inc42: What kind of companies do you not invest in? Give us examples of why a brand would fail to qualify during your due diligence.

Kanwaljit Singh: Brands promoting tobacco and alcohol are a big no. Besides, we do not invest in companies where business models are highly environmentally insensitive. 

It could even be something like it’s a very unhealthy product, high sugar content, lots of processed meat and so on. We intrinsically believe that’s not the right space to invest in. We also believe consumers are becoming smarter. If somebody sells products with high palm oil, high sugar, and high maida content, then not only is it contrary to our approach of what is good for the consumer, but it doesn’t even make business sense these days.

Inc42: Now that you stressed the ESG aspect, fast fashion is highly environmentally insensitive. Why did you choose to back NewMe?

Kannan Sitaram: That is something we deliberated on for a long time before investing. And our understanding is that in India, fast fashion works differently in the sense that somebody may stop using a cloth, but they don’t throw it in the bin. It usually gets reused by somebody else, like house help or others, unlike the West, where people just throw it. So, we don’t come from the point of view that it is intensely damaging the environment the way it is seen to be in Western economies. 

Kanwaljit Singh: Look, besides, we do believe that consumer companies, in some form or the other, contribute to the environmental pollution through the use of plastics, packaging and so on. The only way to address it is to programmatise it. So, our first effort is in the process of diligence. We have a formal ESG due diligence for every company. Someone very experienced looks into the ESG aspects, guiding us as to which areas we need to work with the startups to enable them to abide by better ESG norms.

She also works with partners in the ecosystem who can help our brands with alternative solutions. In the case of our fast fashion investment, NewMe, she has been sitting with the board members to help them define their roadmap on how to reduce the consumption of plastic. To be honest, the founders are also becoming more conscious and sensitive towards the environmental aspects.

Inc42: Fireside has backed some of the top consumer brands over the years. While we know the success stories, tell us a little about the failure rate. 

Kanwaljit Singh: I don’t want to call it failure at all. When it comes to a point that we see, for some reasons, a company is not doing so well – it could be circumstances, market situations, or any other issues – we look for ways to exit that either through a strategic or as a consolidation play to some private equity players. The good news is that the number is very small.

Between 20-25% of companies in every fund give us outsized returns, we call them the super winners. Take examples like BoAt and The Ayurveda Experience. Though we haven’t exited them, they have done extremely well. Similarly, the emerging ones from second fund are The Sleep Company, Pilgrim, Traya, and Supertails. 

Another 50-60% are the winners. Now that math makes us a successful fund because the ratio is so powerful that 70%-80% of our company is returning the cash with some additional returns. So, the bottom 15-20% is where we either get back only capital or sometimes not even that, but very rarely we have a situation when it shuts down. We are always able to find some form of either a strategic acquisition. 

Inc42: Do you see a Nestle or L’Oreal kind of brand emerging from India? 

Kanwaljit Singh: The answer is yes. I believe it will happen, and I hope it happens so that we see global brands from India. But brand building is a long journey. And India is such a deep market and so underpenetrated that I would not encourage many of my companies to start thinking of too many different proliferations. But as they develop, as they build, I think that is a very natural opportunity to go international. 

Two of our companies, The Ayurveda Experience and Vahdam, were born globally. Both of them started by selling to the US market, and then they expanded to Europe, Canada. While they might not be Nestle or L’Oreal yet, they are reasonably large for us to feel confident that this is the direction these brands will take. 

Honestly, 90% of our investment will continue to be India-focussed because the market opportunity here is so large.

Inc42: Tell us a little about AI in consumer businesses. How are things changing?

Kannan Sitaram: The important piece for us here is the way brands can connect with consumers in a more personalised way. More companies are doing AI-generated creatives and are trying to create a better consumer experience with the brand

Many companies are now using bots, but that is not to dehumanise the interface. Rather, it is about dealing with people better, acquiring more consumers and retaining them, while reducing the cost of acquiring and retaining. 

[Edited By Nikhil Subramaniam]