Saturday, May 16, 2026: D2C Insider, a community platform for consumer brand founders and enablers, is gearing up to launch a new venture capital fund named ConsumerX Ventures, with a target corpus of Rs 150 crore.
Sources close to the development have confirmed the plans, though an official announcement is yet to be made.
Structured as a Category II Alternative Investment Fund, ConsumerX Ventures plans to back around 25 early-stage D2C brands and enablers at the pre-seed and seed stages. Each investment is expected to range between Rs 3 crore and Rs 5 crore, with the fund looking to acquire an ownership stake of 10 to 15 percent in every portfolio company.
Notably, 40 percent of the total corpus has been set aside as follow-on capital, reflecting the fund’s intent to continue supporting its best-performing bets as they grow.
Abhishek Shah, Chief Evangelist at D2C Insider, will lead the fund as Managing Partner. He will be joined by Chhavi Bhardwaj Kargaonkar, who currently manages D2C Insider’s Super Angels fund and brings solid on-ground experience in deploying early-stage capital within the consumer space.
Roadshows are expected to begin shortly, with the team actively courting institutional and strategic investors. The fund is also reportedly in advanced talks with a large consumer conglomerate to come on board as an anchor investor, a development that could significantly strengthen its market standing.
ConsumerX Ventures is positioning itself around some of the most compelling shifts in Indian consumption today. The fund plans to back brands riding the wave of Gen Z and millennial spending, the rapid growth of quick commerce, and the rise of Tier II and Tier III cities as serious consumer markets.
D2C Insider’s ConsumerX Ventures to Write Cheques of Up to Rs 5 Crore
This comes at a time when industry data shows that smaller cities accounted for as much as 66 percent of new D2C Insider orders in FY26, making it clear that India’s consumer story has moved well beyond its metros.
Portfolio companies will be expected to reach Rs 100 crore in revenue with a clear path to profitability before raising a Series A from leading venture capital firms, ideally within 18 months of receiving ConsumerX capital.
What makes this fund launch particularly interesting is the story behind the platform itself. D2C Insider did not start as an investment firm. It began in 2019 as a community on a social networking app and grew organically into one of the most practitioner-driven networks in India’s startup world.
Today, it counts more than 25,000 members across the country, including over 20,000 brands, more than 7,500 enabler-founders, and upwards of 2,500 investors.
Its founding members include some of the most recognisable names in Indian consumer brands such as Aman Gupta of boAt, Ghazal Alagh of Mamaearth, Tarun Sharma of mCaffeine, Manish Chowdhary of Wow Skin, Hitesh Dhingra of The Man Company, Mohit Sadaani of The MomsCo, Arjun Vaidya of V3 Ventures, and Aditya Khanna of Assembly.
The community is already active on the investing front. Its Super Angels fund, a Category I AIF with a corpus of Rs 25 crore backed by over 70 operator limited partners, is currently in deployment mode.
ConsumerX Ventures is less of a departure and more of a natural next step for a community that has spent years understanding the market from the inside, before deciding to put serious capital behind its convictions.
