Peyush Bansal, cofounder and CEO of Lenskart Solutions.
© 2025 Bloomberg Finance LP
Peyush Bansal, the cofounder of eyewear retailer Lenskart Solutions, is the latest Indian to join the three-comma club. Shares of SoftBank-backed Lenskart, which went public nine months ago, hit an all-time high of nearly 627 rupees on the National Stock Exchange last week. Bansal's close to 9% stake in the $11 billion market cap company plus the proceeds of shares he sold in the IPO, give him an estimated net worth of $1 billion.
The stock jumped after the company reported a four-fold rise in net profit to 2.28 billion rupees ($24 million) for the quarter ended June 30 amid surging sales in both domestic and overseas markets. Headquartered in the northern Indian city of Faridabad, Lenskart sells everything from glasses to sunglasses to eyewear accessories both online and through a network of stores.
It has a presence in 16 countries including Singapore, Japan and the UAE, apart from India where it has 2,725 stores across 157 cities. It added 132 stores in the latest quarter, of which 116 were in India and 16 overseas taking the company's total store count to 3,459 stores.
Bansal, 42, started the business in 2010 with his sister Neha, who heads merchandising and two other cofounders, Amit Chaudhari, the sourcing chief and Sumeet Kapahi, who oversees the store network. The company got going initially as an online retailer offering customers a 3D feature to try on the glasses virtually. It later expanded offline opening its first store in New Delhi in 2013.
“Buying spectacles is not an easy decision,†says Arvind Singhal, chairman of Gurgaon-based retail consultancy, The Knowledge Company. “You want the opinion of a family member or a friend and you want to look at a wide assortment. It is good that Lenskart corrected course and opened physical stores.â€
Bansal took the company public in November 2025, raising $821 million in an IPO that was oversubscribed 28 times. However, the stock listed at a 3% discount to its issue price.
SoftBank first invested in Lenskart in December 2019, leading a $275 million funding round that made Lenskart a unicorn. The Japanese investor sold a small stake during the IPO but offloaded a bigger 3.25% stake for $300 million in June after the mandatory six-month lock-in period had ended. It still remains the largest shareholder with a nearly 10% stake. Other marquee investors include Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, private equity giant KKR and TPG.
Bansal, who has an undergrad degree in electrical engineering from Canada's McGill University, started his career with Microsoft in Redmond where he worked as a program manager for its MS Office product. He quit within a year to move back to India in 2007 and started Valyoo Technologies a year later. It operated a website called searchmycampus.com aimed at helping students find campus housing.
Reading an article about how India was an underserved market in eyecare and eyewear, gave him new direction: organized eyewear retailing was a ripe opportunity as the market was dominated by scores of small opticians across the country. He worked at one such shop in Delhi to get a better understanding of the business before he took the plunge.
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An October 2025 report by Mumbai investment firm ICICI Direct pegs the size of the Indian eyewear market at $9.2 billion in fiscal 2025 and projects it will expand to $17.2 billion in fiscal 2030. Prescription glasses account for 75% of sales with sunglasses contributing $2 billion or just over a fifth and contact lenses the remainder. Sales of sunglasses is expected to nearly double to $4 billion by fiscal 2030 while the contact lenses segment is expected to expand to $730 million from $ 480 million over the same period.
Lenskart's main rival is Titan Eye + , the eyewear division of Titan Company, part of the Tata conglomerate but its revenue of 9.16 billion rupees for fiscal 2026 and store count of less than 1,000 are both well behind Lenskart. Other legacy retailers such as Kolkata-based Himalaya Opticals and Delhi-based Bonton Opticians compete in the luxury and premium niche.
Analysts say that the eyewear market has enough room for all players. ICICI Direct estimates that as of 2020, 43% of the country's population had weak eyes and by 2030, nearly two-thirds of Indians will need eyeglasses.
Foreseeing this trend, Bansal has been ramping up Lenskart's brick and mortar presence. The store count crossed 1,000 in 2022 and 2,000 in 2025. The overseas expansion started off with opening a store in Singapore in 2019, which has since grown to 65 stores. Lenskart entered the UAE with a store in Dubai in 2022 and Saudi Arabia in 2023.
In June 2022, Bansal cast his gaze on a further horizon by acquiring a majority stake in Japanese eyewear brand Ownday for $400 million. Ownday now has 669 stores from 460 stores when Lenskart acquired it.
For the year ended March 31 Lenskart's net profit jumped 148% to 5.3 billion rupees on revenue that was up nearly a third to 90 billion rupees. Analysts say the company is reaping the benefits of scale and backward integration. It makes lenses at a factory in Rajasthan state and has a joint venture for manufacturing frames at a Chinese factory in Zhengzhou. The company is building a a new factory on a 50-acre site in the southern India city of Hyderabad with the capacity to produce 50 million pairs per year,
“Lenskart's business model is one of a kind,†says Singhal. “Even Titan has not been able to do what the company has done in terms of the scale of manufacturing and the range that they offer.â€
That said, challenges lie ahead. “Lenskart's ability to sustain its growth and profitability will depend on its resilience across four critical fronts – securing stable and cost-effective raw material supplies, maintaining uninterrupted manufacturing operations, attracting and retaining skilled vision-care talent, and navigating intensifying global competition in the eyewear industry,†says Amarjeet Maurya, deputy vice president for fundamental research at Mumbai-based Kotak Securities.
Bansal, who refused to comment when contacted, has outlined his vision for Lenskart in the company's latest quarterly presentation. “We set out to sell eyeglasses,†he noted. “It was always a dream—to change how a billion people see and experience the world…Few companies get to attempt this. It is still Day Zero.â€
