Brands
Pee Safe raises Rs 290 Crore as OrbiMed backs its next leap
NEW DELHI: Pee Safe has cleaned up big time. The New Delhi-based women’s hygiene and wellness brand has raised $ 32 million or about Rs 290 crore in a series C funding round led by OrbiMed, a global healthcare-focused private equity firm.
The round includes a mix of fresh capital and secondary share purchases from early backers. The money will help Pee Safe press the accelerator on offline retail expansion, dial up brand-led marketing, and deepen its presence across quick commerce platforms and major online marketplaces.
Founded by Vikas Bagaria and Rithish Kumar, Pee Safe operates in categories most brands once tiptoed around. Toilet hygiene, feminine care and intimate wellness are now its calling cards. The company claims an annualised net revenue run rate of over Rs 150 crore and, notably, is profitable. In India’s consumer startup landscape, that is still more exception than rule.
The founders say the brand was built to tackle taboos head-on, and the numbers suggest consumers are listening. Pee Safe today serves millions of women in India and overseas and is steadily widening its playbook in personal care and wellness.
“From day one, the focus was on strong fundamentals and long-term thinking,” said Bagaria. “That discipline has allowed us to scale without burning cash. OrbiMed shares our belief in the consumer healthcare opportunity and that makes this partnership a natural fit.”
Kumar added that the funding will help the company balance reach and speed. Offline shelves are a priority, but so is winning the fast lane of quick commerce and e-commerce.
OrbiMed is equally bullish. Senior managing director Sunny Sharma said Pee Safe has built a differentiated brand with loyal consumers in large, high-impact categories. Sharma, along with Sumona Chakraborty, will join the company’s board.
With fresh capital and a global healthcare investor on board, Pee Safe is setting out to make women’s hygiene not just mainstream, but truly mass.
Brands
Pine Labs appoints Shalini Pillai as CMO
Former Microsoft marketing director to steer global brand
MUMBAI: Fintech platform Pine Labs has named Shalini Pillai as its new chief marketing officer, handing her the reins of global marketing, product marketing, marcom and brand positioning as the company sharpens its worldwide ambitions.
Pillai joins from Microsoft, where she served as marketing director for India and South Asia. Her career reads like a tour of modern tech marketing. At Google, she led consumer apps marketing in India, steered GPay and new business initiatives marketing, and earlier drove growth across the India SMB segment. Long before big tech, she co-founded BrandIdea Consultancy, building tools for market planning and ROI analytics, and began her journey at Coca-Cola India in sales and brand roles.
An MBA from the Indian School of Business, Pillai brings more than two decades of experience spanning boardrooms and bootstraps, B2C buzz and B2B backbone.
Announcing the appointment, Pine Labs chief executive B. Amrish Rau said Pillai’s technology-led marketing pedigree and data-driven approach make her well placed to lead the company’s next chapter of transformation and growth. He noted her track record in scaling digital products and building integrated brand and product engines across global markets.
For her part, Pillai sees fintech’s future in seamless infrastructure. She described Pine Labs as sitting at the crossroads of merchant relationships and sovereign-scale technology, turning consumer intent into instant execution. Her mandate is clear: craft an integrated market strategy and expand the company’s footprint to deliver compounding commercial value worldwide.
The move comes as Pine Labs doubles down on artificial intelligence across its payments stack and developer tools, and deepens its collaboration with OpenAI. With a seasoned marketer now at the helm, the company appears ready to tell its next growth story with sharper focus and a louder voice.
