Caratlane: Anatomy Of A Glittering Exit

Mithun Sacheti gets a dream exit from the only profitable startup in the Tata group stable

- Ranjani Raghavan & Suneera Tandon

He started his business in 2008, at the height of the Lehman Brothers collapse, and he’s walking away in 2023, at the height of the startup funding winter. When news of the c-Caratlane deal broke over the weekend, observers were struck by founder Mithun Sacheti’s timing, and, of course, how he would walk away with a cool $556 million, in a rare, clean, cash exit.

To be sure, this is an unusual event in the Indian startup ecosystem, where most founders, including those who founded Zomato and Nykaa, have their net worth tied up in their companies’ shares. The Bansals of Flipkart are an exception, having pocketed over a billion dollars each in cash from the sale of their stakes to Walmart, between 2018 and 2021. With this deal, the ecosystem will have its third such cash-rich startup founder.

Sacheti agreed to sell his 27% stake in Caratlane to Titan for over ₹4,621 crore on Saturday, in a deal that will take the latter’s stake in the business to over 98%, and value Caratlane at over ₹17,000 crore ($2 billion). This is the final part of a transaction that was first struck in 2016, when Titan acquired a 62% stake in the company from Tiger Global for ₹357.24 crore, then valuing Caratlane at ₹576 crore.

‘Hyper-growth ahead’

In 2016, Tiger Global barely made a profitable exit. The hedge fund invested a total of ₹302 crore across four tranches beginning 2011, and exited with a small profit in 2016, less attractive in dollar terms, according to VCCircle and VCCEdge reports of the time.