To promote awareness about feminine hygiene, two individuals namely Shashwat Diesh and Aqib Mohammad founded Azah in November 2018. The start-up was founded with the motive to improve, innovate, and offer high-quality products that solve mensuration related hygiene issues faced by the Indian women population. The start-up aims to be the one-stop solution for high-quality women’s hygiene products and claims to have been developing at a rapid rate of 30 percent month-on-month, with nearly more than 50 percent of its revenue being generated from repeat clients.
The start-up has received positive reviews from clients across numerous e-commerce platforms and has successfully sold 2,00,000 pads within a span of 5 months of launch. The start-up has also successfully served clients in over 1800 pin codes across India with average delivery time being only 2.5 days. They get their regular orders from North-eastern states including Tripura and Arunachal Pradesh.
The start-up’s average monthly revenue has been growing at 50% and the revenue successfully crossed Rs 10 lakhs in March 2019. Currently, the Azah team has 9 members operating to achieve the finest results.
Shashwat Diesh, Co-founder, Azah, commented on the functioning of the start-up, stating that the women’s wellness sector has been particularly open to disruption due to the relative lack of innovation over the past couple of decades. Increasing consumer awareness about menstrual hygiene has led individuals to demand better quality products, and this is the reason why newer homegrown brands have stood up well to the challenge of satisfying this requirement, and that’s where Azah comes into the picture.
Coming to the investment news, Azah recently announced that it successfully raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Snapdeal founders Rohit Bansal and Kunal Bahl, AngelList India and a few other HNIs in a pre-series A funding. The lead funding was fetched from Titan Capital, a VC-arm run by Rohit and Kunal. Before this huge funding, Azah had successfully fetched seed funding amounting to $2,00,000 from a group of angel investors with the motive to expand the business and optimize its supply chain management.
To add on to some extra information, both Aqib and Shashwat once worked at Snapdeal before joining together for Azah.
On the investment, Prakhar Agarwal, Investments Lead, AngelList India mentioned that the founders of Azah have been doing an incredible job at developing a brand that resonates perfectly with its clients, and he has been looking forward to the new items that Azah motives to introduce to their existing offerings with this new round of fresh funding. Further, in a statement, Azah mentioned that they plan to utilize the procured investment in enhancing the production, launch new products and expand the sales operations in Tier II and III cities for the users.
Aqib Mohammad, Co-founder, Azah, mentioned that these procured funds will benefit the start-up to further their mission to make a woman’s period easier by introducing products that actually solve her difficulties. A good part of the funding will be spent on research and development of these innovative products, while also benefiting the start-up to carry out further innovation in the current product line. In the end, he also added that the start-up will be using the investment to expand its reach to newer demographics while discovering alternative means to drive development and acquisition. The start-up plans to double its monthly revenue by the end of the next quarter.
The start-up has been moving forward positively under the expert guidance of Mr. Mehmood Khan who worked as a Global Leader at the innovation process at Unilever from 1990 to 2009.