How SMG Built Fynd Into a ~₹300 Crore Retail Engine
The IIT designer who chose infrastructure over marketplace glory and sold to Reliance for ~₹300 crore
In 2013, a Diesel store in Mumbai had an unusual problem. A 40-inch touchscreen had been installed where customers could digitally dress a model. The device was so popular that store managers had to switch it off during peak hours. People weren’t shopping, they were crowding around the screen.
For most founders, this would signal product-market fit. For Sreeraman Mohan Girija and his co-founders at ShopSense, it was a lesson about customer delight versus sustainable business.
We thought, from both a customer and brand perspective, is there something interesting with technology that we can do inside the store that will increase engagement time.
Twelve years later, his company Fynd powers 2,300+ brands across 20,000+ stores, does ₹300-350 crore in annual revenue, and employs 1,100 people. Yet most consumers have never heard of it.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
The Hardware Trap
The ShopSense Match product looked perfect. Fashion retailers paid ₹10,000 monthly per device. Customers loved it. But the economics were broken.
Each touchscreen cost ₹50,000 upfront. Stores needed rewiring. Pre-Jio internet was unreliable. The fatal flaw was attribution.
While we had data showing a 10-12% uplift, it was difficult to convince a brand because the transaction did not happen on the device. Transactions are happening on the point of sale system.
By 2015, ShopSense was doing roughly ₹1 crore in revenue after raising $1 million from Kae Capital and IIFL.
They pivoted to real-time inventory data they already had. What if Tier 2 cities could shop from Mumbai stores? They built a hyperlocal marketplace with 2-3 hour delivery and “Find a Fit” where customers ordered two sizes, tried both, and returned one.
In fashion, the biggest problem is fit.
By 2016-17, after raising $10 million from Google, the marketplace hit ₹5 crore in revenue. Then came the wall: customer acquisition costs, logistics, discounting wars.
Everyone loves a discount. That became the default expectation. That requires a lot more capital.
Meanwhile, the technology Fynd built (storefront builders, inventory systems, marketplace connectors) was valuable to brands wanting omnichannel. Reliance Brands Limited had started using Fynd’s tech.
When Reliance Industries invested in 2019, they weren’t buying a marketplace doing ₹5 crore. They were buying infrastructure powering their operations.
Reliance acquired 87% for ₹295 crore. Investors made 8x returns. The consumer marketplace shut down. Fynd became pure B2B infrastructure.
Scale as Strategy
The first year was rough.
You’re talking about one of the largest employers in the country. And here we are like a startup, move fast and break things. It took us a good year to culturally adapt both ways.
But once aligned, Fynd got scale impossible for an independent startup.
When we started working with Reliance, we understood there is this edge case, this use case, this format. How do you build a platform that serves all those purposes?
The product explosion was dramatic. Fynd built D2C websites, point-of-sale systems, endless aisle tablets, AR try-on, order and warehouse management, marketplace connectors (ranked #1 by Amazon), AI support (Kaily), AI photography (Pixelbin), and AI fashion design (Fynd Create).
Revenue grew from ₹5 crore to ₹300-350 crore. Small brands pay ₹10,000-20,000 monthly with transaction fees. Enterprise clients pay lakhs.
As they scale, we charge something on top of transactions, which they’re happy to spend.
Today, 80% revenue is enterprise. Out of 1,100 employees, 600-700 are engineers and designers.
The Designer’s Edge
Sreeraman has a Master’s in Interaction Design from IIT Bombay. This shapes everything.
When you are building a product, you only optimize for the end customer. Not your engineering team’s capabilities.
He leads a 100-person design organization. His hiring test is empathy. If candidates defer to managers or can’t articulate customer-first reasoning, it’s a red flag.
Sreeraman has strong views. CRED is “fantastic design but value has gone down.” Amazon is ugly but fast, making it great. Figma beat Sketch through distribution, not design.
Design is not beauty. Design is what works.
This shows in Fynd’s conversational commerce approach. Sreeraman believes shopping will shift to chat but is skeptical of simplistic visions.
Shopping behavior is going to change. As a brand, are you ready to provide that experience on your website?
Need-based shopping (groceries) works in chat. Want-based shopping (fashion) requires visual browsing. Fynd’s AI stack plugs into whatever interface wins.
Going Global & The 2030 Vision
By 2022, Fynd had saturated India. They chose Middle East first (MAF, Rivoli, FNAC), then Southeast Asia (Superindo). In 2024, Sreeraman walked over 100 UK stores.
When we started conversations with retailers, lot of people in tech had some Indian connection. They’d worked with Reliance.
International revenue is under 10%. Canada is in pipeline with shoppable TV.
Sreeraman is thinking about “AI-native unified commerce” by 2030. India’s e-commerce should hit $345 billion. AI in retail will grow 14x. ONDC threatens to drop marketplace commissions from 25-35% to 5-8%.
Fynd’s bet: brands need zero-touch operations, conversational discovery, open protocols, composable infrastructure. The platform processes transactions for 20 million+ customers at Reliance scale.
Why Infrastructure Wins
The irony of Fynd’s story is deliberate obscurity. While Flipkart and Amazon battle for mindshare, Fynd quietly powers thousands of brand experiences behind the scenes.
These ideas are really fragile when they start off. In a meeting, it’s very easy to rip apart an idea.
The same applies to infrastructure businesses. In a world obsessed with consumer metrics, choosing pipes over destinations requires conviction. Twelve years in, that conviction produced a ₹300 crore business, a strategic acquisition, and a platform touching millions of transactions daily.
Not bad for a designer who started with touchscreens in fashion stores.
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