Mensa Brands invests in 10 digital-first brands in fashion, home and beauty categories

Mensa Brands, India's first tech-led House of Brands, has partnered with 10 digital-first businesses in the fashion, home, and beauty categories. Mensa plans to invest in digital-first brands to scale them. Over the next three years, it will acquire 50+ brands across categories, including home, garden, apparel, personal care, and beauty.

"We are excited to announce our partnership with 10 remarkable founding teams that have created beloved digital brands. We are committed to propelling their journey forward and working together to build global breakout brands from India," said Ananth Narayanan, Founder and CEO of Mensa Brands.

Mensa partners with brands with revenue between $1 million and $10 million, and targets digital-first brands operating in different categories, including fashion and apparel, home and garden, beauty and personal care, food, and others. The team is led by Founder and CEO Ananth Narayanan, who was previously the CEO of Myntra, Medlife, and a Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company.

The partner brands include Karagiri, a one-stop destination for high-end, designer sarees based out of Pune; Priyaasi, a traditional and contemporary jewellery brand from Delhi that works on traditional artwork and materials in modern designs. Mensa will also partner with Dennis Lingo, a men's casual wear brand from Mumbai, as well as Ishin, and Anubhutee, both women's ethnic wear brand from Mumbai and Jaipur, respectively.

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"We really look forward to being a part of the Mensa family. We will work together to build Villain into a household-name lifestyle brand for men across India. This is the beginning of a long and fruitful partnership, one that hopefully lasts across many brands," said Ashutosh Valani, Co-founder of Villain (who has previously founded the men's grooming company, Beardo)

"We are excited to partner with Mensa as they are an experienced team that understands how to scale brands on e-commerce sustainably," says Charu Agarwal, Founder of Ishin. She adds, "Over the past couple of months working with Mensa, we have already started increasing our sales by working together on growth, supply chain and marketing, leveraging working capital, data, technology and the team's e-commerce experience."

Mensa has offices in Bangalore, Mumbai and Gurugram, and plans to scale its team exponentially in the coming months, hiring across growth, product, finance, among others.

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