MAM
Nester appoints Kunwarjeet Grover as cofounder & CBO
D2C home appliance startup strengthens leadership with 15 plus years consumer veteran.
MUMBAI: Nester just plugged in a powerhouse because when your air fryers need to fry the competition, you bring in the growth guru who’s already heated up the kitchen. Nester, the direct-to-consumer home appliance startup founded in 2025, has appointed Kunwarjeet Grover as cofounder and chief business officer. Grover brings over 15 years of experience scaling consumer brands across Himalaya Herbal Healthcare, Cavinkare, Philips Lighting, Havells India, and most recently Wellbeing Nutrition (where he was vice president of growth until June 2025). He also briefly headed growth at Pluck in 2023 and served as senior vice president at Honasa for over four years, overseeing its online marketplace.
Nester founder and CEO Abhinav Singh said, “Grover has a wealth of knowledge on how to build digital-first brands and his experience of disruptively scaling consumer brands truly aligns with Nester’s goal and vision.”
The Mumbai-based brand sells air fryers, toasters, juicers and other kitchen appliances, competing with players like Nuuk, Atomberg, Geek Technology and Wonderchef. It currently sells via e-commerce marketplaces and its own website, with plans to expand into quick commerce and offline retail. Manufacturing is handled through contract partners, though the company has indicated it intends to set up its own production facility soon.
The appointment follows Nester’s recent Rs 19 crore Pre-Series A funding round led by Fireside Ventures and OTP Ventures.
Grover joins at a pivotal time for the D2C home appliances and consumer electronics category, projected to cross $30 billion by 2030 (growing at 7.2 per cent CAGR from $23.7 billion in 2025), fuelled by quick commerce and rising demand for premium, convenient kitchen solutions.
In a market where every appliance needs to cook up growth, Nester isn’t just adding a cofounder, it’s turning up the heat on ambition, one strategic hire at a time.
MAM
The Merit of Madness: How AI is Changing the Game in Advertising
By Ritz Malik, founder, Ritz Media World.
MUMBAI: When it comes to growth in a competitive landscape, a businessman always has to be a firm believer in Darwinism. You either need to bring a better product, or a better price, or both to the table to get customers and scale. Without this value proposition, you remain unnoticed, and staying unnoticed is not something that a brand wants to do.
You have to do all this and also make sure that you stay cashflow positive at the same time. Otherwise, you’re at a real risk of becoming a large hollow balloon that your competitors are just waiting for to explode or implode under its own weight.
As we’ve entered the era of AI, the notion of a product’s efficacy, cost efficiency, marketability, workflow management, and logistics reliability has become increasingly relevant and prevalently impactful. None of this is background noise anymore. It is the difference between bleeding money on traditional media and actually engineering a profitable campaign.
For example, META’s AI Algorithm has finally given us the ability to measure the ‘CREATIVE’ for a business’s promotions. The best part is that we can do so organically. Content that is actually relevant to the target audience gets more views through reach. This tells us exactly how the audience is reacting before we even scale the budget. This is how we have been gifted the ability to provide merit to the madness of the creative process.
So, our process is as follows:
A set of creatives is built for social media
Their performance is closely monitored for reach and engagement.
Based on the best organic performance, we choose the creative.
Make micro adjustments to add a sales proposition and CTA (but keep it subtle)
Publish the modified creative as an ad.
There’s a lot that goes on in between, but this is the basic method for getting it right. And this is just the AI that’s being used by platforms across the world.
AI utilisation is something that has greatly made the creative process a lot easier. As an agency that thrives on coming up with ideas that are out of this world, we have made the most of leveraging AI to bring ideas to life without spending a fortune.
So, this way, the ability to create high-impact brand stories is no longer under the tyrannical gatekeeping of large budget organisations. It is now that merit solely falls on the storyteller.
Now, AI-powered content production and the AI algorithm on Social Media platforms are asking the question: Is your content compelling?. If yes, the audience will watch your content, share it, and engage with it.
And when it comes to keeping budgets down, we can surely say that it holds the capability to execute million-dollar shoots at a fraction of the cost.
For example, we recently came across a creative challenge by a major Real Estate Developer from Gurugram. They had signed a celebrity couple for their brand ambassadorship a few months ago. They were now about to launch their new project, but for some reason, they could not get their shoot done.
What we came up with was to use the likeness of this celebrity couple and place them throughout the project’s feature video. With the help of AI generation, we were able to rebuild a completely new feature video with their brand ambassadors in 2 days, and no additional physical shots were required.
Imagine being able to save 50-60 lakhs in production costs, 15-20 days in production time, and comfortably be ahead of schedule to launch the project.
This has changed the game entirely. With AI, you can now just acquire the likeness rights of celebrities, and you can just build environments and scenarios with them. The balance between creative and artificial intelligence isn’t a battle for control; it is simply the ultimate tool for survival and scale in a landscape that rewards the fastest and the smartest.
