The Setback Files
Most coverage records the milestones. The Setback Files document the harder periods — a downturn, a difficult restructuring, a delayed round, a quiet rebuilding year — that shaped these companies just as much.
How this series works: every Setback story is drawn from publicly reported facts, regulatory filings and on-the-record interviews, and is reported factually, without dramatisation.
JetSetGo flies dignitaries, business leaders and sportspeople across India. Kanika and her co-founder Sudheer Perla built it from her recovery and a notebook of operator contacts.
LimeRoad was one of the earliest Indian platforms to merge content and shopping. Its founder, a former eBay and Skype executive, ran it through a decade of capital cycles before V-Mart Retail bought it in a slump sale in October 2022.
Founded in 2011 to serve the next-half-billion online shoppers, ShopClues briefly joined India’s unicorn club. Its later story is one of the most quietly important in Indian e-commerce.
Founded in 2010 with Vivek Prabhakar, Chumbak put a recognisable Indian-design point of view onto fridge magnets, mugs, bags and home goods. Its second decade was harder than its first.
An IIT-IIM graduate and ultramarathoner, Vineeta spent more than a decade building a beauty brand designed specifically for Indian skin.
She turned a quiet, awkward category into a category-defining online brand, now part of the Reliance Retail family.
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