My best investment was in Shark Tank Judge Ghazal Alagh’s Mamaearth: Shilpa Shetty Kundra
₹35 crores," Kundra said at a fireside chat titled ‘Scaling startups through brand ambassadors’. "I didn’t know I’d make so much money." The Bollywood actor, who also serves as a brand ambassador for Mamaearth, had invested ₹6.7 crore in Honasa Consumer Ltd, Mamaearth’s parent company in 2018, to acquire 16 lakh shares. When the company went public in 2023, Kundra offloaded 13.93 lakh shares for a total of ₹45.13 crore.
She had bought the shares at ₹41.86 each, as per the company’s red herring prospectus, and the price band had been set at ₹308-324 for the IPO, implying a return of 674 times on her initial investment of ₹5.83 crore for the 13.93 lakh shares she had offered to sell in the IPO. She continues to hold 2.3 lakh shares in the beauty and personal care brand after the IPO. Shares of Honasa were trading at ₹402 per share with a market cap of ₹13,000 crore as per Thursday’s market close.
On being quizzed about what drove her to invest in startups at a time when her peers in the Bollywood were mostly known for investing in traditional assets like real estate, she said that celebrities are increasingly investing their money in brands they endorse and not just taking sweat equity. “They've got skin in the game because they know that the return will get them much better benefits in a shorter time." According to her, today’s consumers are smart and know when a celebrity is invested in a business or a product, and when are they just leveraging their name. “When you show me solution to a problem, you get my attention and investment," is how Kundra explains her investment mantra.
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