Lenskart's vertical eyewear bet: ₹7,278 Cr IPO, 30x bids, flat debut

Lenskart's bet is that eyewear can be transformed the way apparel and footwear were: a full-stack company that designs, manufactures and ships glasses, and sells them through its own stores and apps. Founder Peyush Bansal, then a Microsoft employee in Seattle, started it in 2010 after learning that about half the world needs glasses and roughly half of those people don't have them — a health gap he chose to attack with a consumer business.

The path was not linear. Mid-journey, chasing gross merchandise value pulled Lenskart into unrelated categories until 80% of revenue came from non-eyewear. Bansal cut that revenue, shrinking the company, to return to the mission. SoftBank's $275M round in 2019 then funded a big manufacturing bet — including a factory built with about $100M of cash — on the belief that vertical integration would win the category. By FY25, revenue hit ₹6,625 Cr (+22% YoY) with net profit of ₹297 Cr, a sharp turnaround from a ₹10 Cr loss in FY24.

In October 2025 Lenskart launched a ₹7,278 Cr IPO at ₹382–402 per share, valuing it around ₹69,500 Cr ($7.9B) — about 10x sales. The offer was subscribed 28.26x, but on listing day (November 10) shares opened 1.7–3% below the issue price, reflecting valuation concerns and a grey-market premium that had collapsed to near zero. The stock then recovered, settling at ₹404.55 that day.

A month later, first-quarter disclosures after listing showed the strategy still compounding: Q2 FY26 net profit rose 19.8% to ₹103.4 Cr, revenue grew 20.8% to ₹2,096.1 Cr, and in-house manufacturing had lifted product margins to 69% from 64% in FY23. With international operations contributing around 40% of revenue and a Hyderabad factory localising frame production, Lenskart's IPO was both the payoff of the vertical bet and a test of whether Indian investors would pay for it.