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Edition #167

The Insight Labs Daily.

Fri · Jun 26 · 2026 ~7 min read
★ Lead Story
Two days ago · 2 min read

Mamaearth's parent is quietly building a health company

On June 24, Honasa Consumer — the parent of Mamaearth — approved buying a 58% stake in Fluence Pharma, a nutraceuticals maker, for about Rs 135 crore, with the remaining 42% to follow over the next five to seven years.

Alongside the deal it is setting up Honasa Health, a wholly owned subsidiary built to run a supplements business end to end. Fluence sells condition-specific OTC kits through a network of more than 3,000 dermatologists and trichologists.

The number that frames it: Honasa posted Rs 200 crore of net profit in FY26, up 175% year on year, and is steering toward Rs 5,500 crore in revenue by FY31 under a plan it calls Honasa 3.0.

The structural read is that a digital-first beauty brand which had a bruising first year as a listed company has stopped trying to win on one hero product. It is assembling a house of brands, and now a health vertical, alongside it.

Why nutraceuticals: the category sits right next to skincare and haircare in the shopper's mind, but it carries higher margins and stronger repeat purchase, and it travels through doctors rather than discounts — a sturdier moat for a brand that grew up buying performance ads.

The risk is integration. Honasa's record with acquired brands has been mixed, and a doctor-led distribution model asks for a different muscle than influencer-led D2C. The Rs 5,500-crore target assumes it can run both engines at once.

The question worth holding: is this the moment a D2C brand becomes a consumer-goods company, or the moment it spreads itself too thin to be excellent at any one thing?

Today's Top 5

5 stories
Bodycraft · Two days ago

A 28-year-old salon chain raised outside money for the first time in nine years

Bengaluru's Bodycraft, a beauty and wellness chain founded in 1997, raised Rs 120 crore in a Series A led by Singularity AMC — its first major outside capital since a Rs 18 crore round back in 2017.

It runs 67 outlets, split across 33 clinics and 34 salons in more than ten cities, and will use the money to add 30 locations and invest in clinical technology.

The number that matters: India's clinical aesthetics market is projected to grow from $2 billion in 2024 to over $7 billion by 2033.

The read is that the cheque is chasing the shift from grooming to clinical — skin treatments, lasers, injectables — where the service cannot be delivered online and the pricing power is real.

It is the offline counterpart to the D2C beauty boom: the brands sell the cream, the clinics sell the procedure, and the second is where the higher-value spending is heading.

MoEngage · Two days ago

An Indian software company is buying AI to keep its customers from leaving

MoEngage, the Bengaluru-founded customer-engagement platform, has acquired San Francisco AI startup Aampe for an undisclosed sum.

Aampe assigns an autonomous agent to each user to decide what message to send, when, and on which channel — it processes more than 200 billion such decisions a week for clients including Grab and Swiggy.

MoEngage closed a $280 million Series F in late 2025; this is the company spending part of it to move from rules-based marketing to agents that decide on their own.

The shift underneath the deal is that marketing automation is being rebuilt around software that acts, not dashboards that merely suggest.

Buying Aampe's reinforcement-learning stack is faster than building it while the window is open — and it puts a US engineering team inside an Indian SaaS firm at the exact moment agentic tools are becoming table stakes.

Mahindra · This month

Carmakers are raising sticker prices and quietly discounting to clear the lot

From June, Maruti Suzuki and Hyundai both lifted prices on select models by up to Rs 30,000, citing input costs. In the same month, Mahindra is dangling benefits of up to Rs 2.85 lakh on select SUVs.

Both moves are real at once. On its volume-selling XUV 3XO, Mahindra's total benefits run between Rs 30,000 and Rs 70,000 depending on the variant.

The number behind it: Mahindra's domestic SUV sales rose 10.7% year on year in May to 58,021 units — still growth, but soft enough that the lot needs discounts to keep moving.

The structural read is that a list-price hike protects margin on paper, while the discount is where real demand actually shows up.

When both travel together in the same month, it usually means volume is harder to come by than the year-on-year headline lets on — worth watching as the monsoon clouds the rural buyer.

Flipkart Minutes · Two days ago

Flipkart's 10-minute arm crossed 1,000 stores — most of them outside the metros

Flipkart Minutes reached 1,000 fulfilment stores across 130 cities on June 24, roughly five times its footprint a year ago, and is adding about 100 stores a month.

The detail that matters: around 90 of those 130 cities are Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets, where average order values run higher than in the metros.

It still trails Blinkit's 2,243 stores, Instamart's 1,143 and Zepto's 1,139 — but it is the only one of the four whose parent already owns the customer.

The read is that the dark-store race has moved past the saturated metros and into smaller cities, where the next wave of online shoppers lives and one well-stocked store faces far less competition.

Owning the customer through the main Flipkart app is the lever: acquisition is cheaper when the shopper is already inside the house.

Delhivery · Two days ago

An early backer is selling Delhivery shares for the third time this quarter

Nexus Venture Partners sold Rs 208 crore of Delhivery shares through a block trade on June 24 — its third stake sale in the logistics company this quarter.

Nexus was among Delhivery's earliest investors. Serial trimming by a founding-era backer is a signal worth reading, even with the stock holding up.

The pattern, not the single sale, is the story: patient early money is steadily handing the stock to the public market.

Early VCs returning capital to their own funds after a listing is ordinary housekeeping, and one sale would mean little on its own.

Three in a single quarter says the easy returns have already been booked, and the next leg of the Delhivery story will have to be carried by operating performance, not the cap table.

⚡ 30-Second Scan

IndiGo wants 550-plus aircraft by 2030 up from 441 today, with annual passengers nearly doubling to 200 million and international capacity rising to 40% of the network, the airline told analysts this month.
India is heading for its driest June in 146 years with rainfall running 46% below normal between June 4 and 22; markets are not panicking yet, but a weak monsoon puts the rural demand recovery back on watch.
Spacetech startup QOSMIC raised $3.3 million from Accel, Prosus and South Park Commons to build optical links that move satellite data from orbit to the ground — a quiet bet on the plumbing behind India's space boom.

Sourced from public reporting; analysis by The Insight Labs.

Sources: Honasa Consumer filing, StartupTalky, Singularity AMC, MoEngage, Autocar India · Cars24, Flipkart, Business Standard, Nexus Venture Partners.

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