Bewakoof Founder Prabhkiran Singh Steps Down After 14 Years — Here’s the Full Story

Fourteen years is a long time to run anything. It’s an especially long time to run a company you started with ₹30,000, a dorm room, and zero idea whether “Bewakoof” would land as a brand name or as a joke nobody got.

Prabhkiran Singh is finding that out now, on his way out the door. On February 24, the Bewakoof founder and CEO announced on LinkedIn that he’s stepping down, staying on only through the end of March 2026 to hand things over cleanly. He said the decision comes down to health, family, and personal priorities, not any crisis at the company.

How Bewakoof actually started

Singh’s Bewakoof origin story is one of the more grounded ones in Indian D2C. He and Siddharth Munot, both IIT Bombay graduates, launched the brand in a small room in Mumbai around 2011 (some company records place the formal launch in 2012), with neither business experience nor outside capital to fall back on. Before Bewakoof, Singh had already run a college side-hustle: a flavoured lassi stall called Khadke gLassi.

There was no seed round waiting for them. Singh has said “Bewakoof has been my baby since I was 21 years old,” reflecting on those early years. He and Munot did their own deliveries by local train and answered customer complaints themselves, because there was no one else to do it. Angel money from Snapdeal’s Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal came only after the business had already found its feet.

It’s worth noting Singh and Munot got the two-founder split right from day one, and stayed co-founders through a 14-year run without a public falling out, which is rarer than it sounds. Founders setting up a similar structure today can stress-test their own split with StartupIndiaX’s Co-founder Equity Split Calculator before the business grows into something the original math no longer fits.

That bootstrapped instinct became the brand’s identity. Bewakoof grew into a Gen Z and millennial-facing label built on quirky, meme-driven merchandise, first crossing ₹100 crore in revenue and eventually shipping more than 20,000 products a day to a social media community of over 6 million followers.

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The TMRW years

In late 2022, Aditya Birla Group’s digital fashion arm TMRW invested ₹200 crore to acquire a majority stake in Bewakoof, folding it into a portfolio built around scaling homegrown D2C brands. It wasn’t an exit for Singh at the time. He stayed on as CEO, running day-to-day operations while TMRW focused on tightening the business.

Deals like this hinge entirely on what the company is worth going in, and that’s usually the hardest number for a founder to pin down on their own. StartupIndiaX’s Startup Valuation Calculator is a reasonable starting point for founders trying to get a working number before they sit down with an acquirer like TMRW.

That tightening shows up in the FY25 numbers. Bewakoof posted operating revenue of ₹173 crore while cutting its losses by roughly 29% to ₹73 crore, a sign the brand was being steered toward profitability rather than pure growth-at-any-cost. It’s the kind of financial discipline a founder-led bootstrap story doesn’t always survive intact, but Bewakoof’s did.

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Why Singh is really leaving

Singh has been fairly direct about the “why.” He wants to focus on his health and his family, describing his time building Bewakoof as almost consuming in the way early-stage founders’ lives often are. He’s said he wanted to build something that would last 100 years, which reads less like a man walking away from a failing project and more like someone confident the foundation will hold without him standing on it.

TMRW, under CEO Prashanth Aluru, will take Bewakoof into its next phase. For a company that’s already been through a majority-stake acquisition and a profitability push, a founder handover is arguably the last major structural shift left before it becomes a fully professionalised, group-run brand rather than a founder-led one.

The other reason Singh has been in the news

If Singh’s name has crossed your feed recently for a second reason, it’s likely this: a LinkedIn post he wrote retelling how ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming picked his college. Singh’s framing was blunt and very shareable: “Most people chase college prestige. Zhang Yiming chased snowfall and seafood.”

The post pointed out that Zhang, a top-ranking Chinese student who could have gone anywhere prestigious, picked Nankai University instead, largely because it snowed there, it was near the sea, and it was far from home. Zhang went on to build ByteDance. Singh’s point, aimed squarely at an Indian audience raised on rank-driven college decisions, was that the “irrational” choice worked out fine.

It’s a small moment next to a 14-year company exit, but it’s worth mentioning because it says something about how Singh thinks and writes: plainly, with a founder’s instinct for a story that travels.

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What this means for Indian D2C

Bewakoof’s arc, bootstrapped idea, angel funding, a majority buyout by a large conglomerate, and now a founder stepping back once the business is stable, is becoming a fairly well-worn path for India’s early D2C generation. It’s a different kind of “exit” than a headline-grabbing acquisition or an IPO. It’s quieter: the founder leaves, the brand and the jobs stay.

For other bootstrapped founders watching, the lesson isn’t really about Bewakoof’s fashion category. It’s about sequencing. Singh didn’t step away during the scrappy years or right after the TMRW deal. He left once the losses were shrinking and the brand had a corporate parent capable of running it without him in the room. That timing, arguably, is the real founder skill on display here.

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