Sujata Pawar spent her career inside pharma, then left to fix the products women had quietly put up with for years

For years, Sujata Pawar knew something most shoppers never stop to ask: what actually goes into a sanitary pad, and why it matters. She had spent her career in pharmaceuticals, where every ingredient is questioned, tested, and justified. So when she experienced the rashes and irritation that millions of Indian women simply learn to tolerate from their sanitary pads, she didn't shrug it off. She went looking for the reason, and what she found bothered her enough to walk away from a stable career and build a brand around the answer. That brand is Avni.

A scientist's eye, an everyday problem

Pawar grew up in Maharashtra in a middle-class household that prized education and steadiness. She was drawn to science early and trained as a pharmacist, a Bachelor of Pharmacy from Dr. L.H. Hiranandani College of Pharmacy at the University of Mumbai, before adding an MBA from NMIMS. It was an unusual pairing: the lab discipline to read a formulation and the commercial nerve to build a brand. Both would matter later, but for a long time neither pointed toward entrepreneurship.

Instead, she went corporate. For the better part of a decade she worked across the pharmaceutical industry, names like Merck Serono, Sanofi, and MSD India, learning how products are researched, tested, and carried to the people who use them. Somewhere in those years she also started noticing what the industry didn't bother to fix. Women's intimate care was a vast, essential category, and yet it was treated with a strange indifference: cheap synthetic materials, almost no transparency, and a wall of silence that kept anyone from asking better questions.

The moment it became personal

The turning point wasn't a boardroom insight. It was her own body. The discomfort she felt sent her into the kind of research her training made second nature, reading what was actually in the leading pads, what dermatologists recommended, why the genuinely safe and sustainable options were either impossible to find or priced out of reach. The conclusion was uncomfortable: the products were built for cost and convenience, not for the women using them, and almost no one was talking about it openly because periods themselves were still something to be whispered about.

So she and her husband, Apurv Agrawal, decided to build the brand they couldn't find. They called it Avni, Sanskrit for "Mother Earth", a name that carried both halves of the mission: care for women, and care for the planet they'd otherwise be loading with plastic. Avni took shape in 2020–21 out of Thane, Maharashtra, positioned from day one as a health-and-sustainability brand rather than just another box on the chemist's shelf.

Building against the grain

The first wall was simply getting people to care. Sustainable, organic-cotton period care wasn't a category Indian shoppers were looking for in 2021; pads were a commodity grabbed in a hurry, not a product to be chosen. Avni had to do the slow work of education, explaining why materials matter, and doing it in a country where the subject is still talked around rather than about.

The second wall was the product itself. Period care is unforgiving: longer lead times, shelf-life and safety constraints, and quality standards that don't allow shortcuts. Sourcing skin-friendly, sustainable materials while keeping prices within reach of an ordinary household was a constant negotiation, and Pawar repeatedly chose reach and trust over fatter margins. Her pharma instinct showed here, claims had to be backed by evidence, materials had to come from suppliers who could prove what they were selling.

The third wall was cultural, and it was the hardest. Decades of glossy multinational advertising hadn't actually removed the shame around menstruation; it had just sold around it. Avni chose a different voice, open, plain, unembarrassed, building a community by refusing to treat a normal biological reality as something to hide.

Funding the mission

Avni didn't try to do it all on savings alone. The couple put in their own money to start, then raised outside capital to grow: a seed round of about US$75,000 from We Founder Circle in April 2021, and later a further investment, around ₹77.5 lakh, on the startup-pitch show Bharat ke Super Founders. That money went where it mattered most for a young consumer brand: inventory, product development, and getting the word out.

The growth that followed came less from splashy marketing than from women telling other women. By early 2023, Avni was reaching more than 55,000 women across over 20,000 pin codes, riding month-on-month growth that at one point ran near 40%. And true to the name, the company tied its commerce to a conscience, pledging a slice of its profits, around 8%, to social and menstrual-health causes.

The product, and the point

What Pawar built isn't a single hero product but a system a woman can stay inside: organic-cotton sanitary pads with a biodegradable core instead of plastic, anti-microbial reusable cloth pads, period panties and liners, menstrual cups with their own cup wash, intimate and period washes, and wipes. Disposable or reusable, cautious or all-in, the range meets women where they are and lets them move toward something gentler at their own pace. The throughline is the founder's original objection: that comfort, safety, affordability, and sustainability were being treated as a menu you had to choose from, when they should simply come together.

What her story tells other founders

Pawar's path carries a few hard-won lessons. The strongest one is that lived experience beats market research, she wasn't solving an abstract problem; she was solving her own, which is why the products feel like they were made by someone who actually uses them. The second is that deep expertise compounds: a pharmacist building a health product starts a long way ahead of someone reverse-engineering one from a trend deck. And the third is quieter, that in a category wrapped in stigma, the brand's real job is to change the conversation, not just win the shelf.

It's also a reminder of where India's biggest openings still sit: not only in software and fintech, where capital floods in, but in the everyday health and care products where women's needs went unexamined for decades. Sometimes the blueprint for the most useful company you can build is the problem you've been quietly living with all along.

Frequently asked questions about Sujata Pawar and Avni

Who is Sujata Pawar?

Sujata Pawar is the co-founder of Avni, a Thane-based menstrual and intimate-care brand she started with her husband, Apurv Agrawal, in 2020–21. She holds a Bachelor of Pharmacy from Dr. L.H. Hiranandani College of Pharmacy (University of Mumbai) and an MBA from NMIMS, and spent years in the pharmaceutical industry at companies including Merck Serono, Sanofi, and MSD India.

What does Avni make?

Avni offers organic-cotton sanitary pads, anti-microbial reusable cloth pads, period panties and liners, menstrual cups and cup wash, intimate and period washes, and wipes, a range that spans disposable and reusable formats, with an emphasis on skin-friendly materials and sustainability.

How is Avni funded?

The founders began with their own investment and then raised outside capital, a seed round of about US$75,000 from We Founder Circle in April 2021, and later a further investment of around ₹77.5 lakh on the show Bharat ke Super Founders. It remains a privately held, founder-led company.

What does the name "Avni" mean?

"Avni" is Sanskrit for "Mother Earth." The founders chose it to capture the brand's twin focus on women's well-being and the environment.