Bewakoof’s Rise: ₹30,000 to ₹200 Crore in 14 Years

The untold story of Prabhkiran Singh — the IIT Bombay engineer who built one of India’s first D2C fashion empires from a slum in Mumbai, and is now choosing to walk away from it after 14 years.

On March 31, 2026, Prabhkiran Singh will step down as CEO of Bewakoof — the company he co-founded at 21 years old, built from a tin-shed office where summer heat made working conditions nearly unbearable, and grew into a brand delivering 20,000 products every single day. He is 36. There was no boardroom fight. No scandal. No hostile acquisition. Just a founder, after 14 years, deciding that the company he built no longer needs him — and that he needs something the company cannot give him back.

It is a rare kind of exit. And it deserves a rare kind of examination — not just of how Bewakoof was built, but of what that building actually cost, and what it ultimately produced.

The Engineer Who Never Wanted a Desk Job

Prabhkiran Singh was born in 1990 and admitted to IIT Bombay in 2007 to study civil engineering. It was not, by his own account, the life he had imagined for himself. Singh wanted to be a cricketer. When that path closed, he found himself at one of India’s most prestigious institutions, studying a subject he had not chosen, heading toward a career he already knew he did not want.

He graduated with a degree and one firm conviction: a 9-to-5 job was not going to happen.

His first attempt at building something independent was Khadke Glassi — a lassi café he ran just outside IIT Bombay from February to September 2010. Eight months in, it shut down. The experience was a failure by any conventional measure, but it clarified something essential: Singh was not the kind of person who could work for someone else. He needed to build.

His IIT batchmate and future co-founder, Siddharth Munot, took a different path after graduation — joining an education startup. But both men were circling the same instinct: that they wanted to create something independently, something entirely their own.

In 2010, with April Fool’s Day approaching, they registered a domain. The name they chose — Bewakoof, meaning “fool” in Hindi — was deliberately absurd, anti-corporate, and exactly the kind of thing every sensible person around them advised against. That was precisely the point.

The Tin Shed: 2011

Bewakoof launched in 2011 out of a tin-shed office on the top floor of a building in a slum in Mumbai. Monthly rent: ₹6,000. Starting capital: ₹30,000. Investors: none. Business experience: none.

For the first two years, Singh and Munot operated the entire business themselves. They designed quirky graphic t-shirts targeted at college students — the kind of designs that referenced pop culture, carried absurdist taglines, and made their audience feel like the brand understood them in a way that bigger, safer fashion labels simply did not. & then they packed orders themselves & delivered t-shirts personally, using Mumbai’s local train network, carrying packages to customers across the city.

Customer queries were handled directly by the founders. Every complaint, every compliment, every order confirmation — Singh or Munot. This was not a lean startup methodology; it was a necessity. But it also gave the brand something that no amount of marketing spend can manufacture: genuine intimacy with its early customers.

Their social media presence reflected the same instinct. On Facebook, Bewakoof built a following through memes, relatable content, and pages like “2 Min Aaya Yaar Raste Mei Hoon” — tapping into the shared language of young India before influencer marketing had a name. Within months of launch, the brand had accumulated 75,000 Facebook fans. Six months in, it had secured its first round of seed funding.

“Bewakoof has been my baby since I was 21 years old… I have decided to leave Bewakoof to prioritise my health, my family, and personal goals that deserve attention.”
— Prabhkiran Singh, February 2026

The Growth Arc: From T-Shirts to 100 Crore

Bewakoof’s expansion was methodical rather than explosive — each phase building on a foundation laid carefully in the one before it.

The Bollywood partnerships of 2015–17 were particularly significant. Bewakoof was not simply licensing popular IP — it was inserting itself into cultural moments that already had enormous audiences, and becoming the brand that let young Indians wear those moments on their bodies. By the time global licenses for Disney, Marvel, and DC came through in 2018, the infrastructure and brand credibility to carry them had already been built.

Crossing ₹100 crore in revenue made Bewakoof the first Indian D2C fashion startup to reach that milestone. It was a commercial validation, but also a signal to the broader market: a brand built around irreverence, community, and graphic t-shirts could scale into a serious business.

The Acquisition and What Came After

In December 2022, TMRW — Aditya Birla Group’s digital fashion arm — acquired a 70–80% stake in Bewakoof at a valuation of approximately ₹200 crore. The deal brought Bewakoof into a portfolio that included The Indian Garage Co., Wrogn, Urbano, and Nobero, and gave the brand access to Aditya Birla’s supply chain expertise and institutional retail infrastructure.

For Singh, it was also the moment the company he had built became, in a structural sense, no longer his. The majority shareholder was now one of India’s largest conglomerates. The scrappy slum-office operation had become a line item in an ABG earnings call — and a significant one, at that. TMRW managing director Ashish Dikshit noted in a Q3 FY26 earnings call that Bewakoof, after a period of slower growth post-acquisition, was now expanding at 40–50% annually.

Singh remained as CEO through the transition, continuing to lead the brand he had spent 14 years building. But the context had changed. The decisions, the direction, the ownership — none of it was his in the way it once had been.

The Exit: Reading Between the Lines

Singh’s announcement in February 2026 was unusually candid. He did not dress his departure in the language of “new opportunities” or “exciting next chapters.” He said clearly that he was leaving to focus on his health, his family, and personal goals that had been deferred for more than a decade.

There are several layers to the decision. Health and family are real, and Singh named them without hedging. But the deeper logic is also visible: Bewakoof’s majority now belongs to Aditya Birla. The founder’s role in a majority-acquired company is structurally different from the founder’s role in a company you own. The creative and operational autonomy that made the early years meaningful had, by necessity, evolved into something more institutional.

Singh also wrote something that is worth sitting with: “Bewakoof raised me when I was raising it.” Fourteen years is not just a professional tenure — it is a substantial portion of an adult life. A clean break, for both founder and brand, was not a failure. It was an honest acknowledgment of what each needed next.

When Singh steps down on March 31, 2026, Bewakoof will have 6 million social media followers, a daily shipment volume of 20,000 products, and a brand identity strong enough to survive its founder’s departure. That last part is perhaps the most meaningful measure of what he built.

5 Takeaways From the Bewakoof Story

Bewakoof began in a tin shed with ₹30,000 and two engineers who had no idea what they were doing. It ends Singh’s chapter as a ₹200 crore business inside one of India’s largest conglomerates, growing at 40–50% annually, with a brand that millions of young Indians recognise without being told what it stands for.

That is not a small thing. And the fact that its founder is choosing health and family over the company he calls his “firstborn” is, in its own way, the most honest possible ending to the story.