In today’s Finshots, we break down the Lenskart Solutions IPO, which opens for subscription today (October 31st) and closes on November 4th (Tuesday).

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The Story

The Lenskart IPO finally opens today. And if you’ve been scrolling through market chatter, you’ve probably read one line over and over, everywhere: “Lenskart is overvalued.”

So, let’s do something fun. Let’s pretend that the IPO is actually a Shark Tank India pitch. Except this time, the sharks are investors like you and me.

*Shark Tank India theme music plays. Lenskart’s Chairman, MD, CEO and co-founder, Peyush Bansal and Chief Financial Officer, Abhishek Gupta walk in with trademark confidence. Polite investors nod all around*

Bansal: Hello, sharks!

My name is Peyush Bansal, and this is our CFO Abhishek Gupta. We’re here to talk about a problem that touches millions of Indian families, and honestly, everyone in this room too.

At some point, we’ve all gone to a neighbourhood optician. We’ve waited, been told to come back in a few days, guessed whether the price was fair, and when the glasses finally arrived… we weren’t even sure if the power felt right. Now, for something as basic as being able to see properly, the experience was slow, uncertain, and honestly, kind of outdated.

So we asked ourselves: why can’t buying eyewear be as seamless as ordering clothes online?

That thought became Lenskart. We wanted to make buying eyewear as simple and delightful as buying fashion online, and to bring world-class vision solutions within reach of every Indian.

So instead of every small shop cutting lenses in the back room with inconsistent quality, we built a fully centralised, technology-driven supply chain. Today, your glasses aren’t made by one technician. They’re made in advanced automated factories. Robots cut lenses, precision machines polish them, every pair goes through stringent quality checks, and in most major cities, it reaches your doorstep in as little as a day.

We didn’t stop at manufacturing. We created India’s largest digital eyewear experience with virtual try-ons, AI-based face and size detection, and paired it with a national store and home-eye-test network. Customers browse online, try in store or at home, and receive centrally manufactured eyewear. So, whether you start online and finish offline, or the other way round, the journey is seamless.

Today, Lenskart operates over 2,800 stores worldwide, including more than 2,100 across India. Our loyalty programme has over 7 million paying members. Our factories in Bhiwadi and Gurugram produced more than 6 million frames last year alone, and we’re now building one of the world’s largest eyewear facilities in Hyderabad. We are also present in Japan, Singapore, Thailand, and the Gulf, and India’s tech and supply chain backbone powers this international growth.

So Sharks, as we head to the public markets, we’re inviting India to own a piece of the country’s largest and fastest-growing eyewear brand by offering 11% equity for ₹7,278 crores. This capital will help us scale our technology, expand to more cities, deepen manufacturing, and take world-class eyewear from India to Asia and beyond. We’ve already changed how India buys eyewear. Now, we want to change how the world sees it.

*sharks continue to smile*

Shark 1: So you’re calling yourself a tech-driven eyewear company. But you’re asking for a valuation that’s higher than many tech firms. Can you walk us through the numbers, so we understand why?

Bansal: Sure. Last year (FY25), we did around ₹7,000 crores in revenue. Over the past two years, our revenue has grown at about 33% a year. And we’re not just growing. We’re getting more efficient too.

Our operating profit margin has improved from 6.8% in FY23 to 14.6% in FY25. In Q1 FY26, it touched 17.7%. That’s happening because revenue went up, and we controlled costs better.

For instance, our marketing spend as a percentage of revenue dropped from 7.7% to 6.7% over two years because our online ads and app don’t just drive online sales, they also bring people into our physical stores. So one marketing spend works in two places.

We’ve also been shifting store formats. Earlier, many stores were franchise-owned and operated (FoFo). Now, we’re focusing more on Company-owned and Company-operated (CoCo) stores. These give us more control over pricing, product mix and customer experience. And they pay back investment faster too, roughly in 10 months.

To accelerate that, we even bought Dealskart — one of our biggest franchise operators, which helped us add more CoCo stores and improve margins. In March 2025, we had 1,749 CoCo stores. Today, we’re at 1,823 and still growing.

And yes, we finally turned profitable in FY25, with ₹297 crore profit.

Shark 2 *interrupts*: How much loss did you make the previous year?

Bansal: Around ₹10 crore.

Shark 2: So your profit jumped nearly 300% in one year? Tell us how that happened.

Gupta: I’ll answer that. Our revenue grew about 23% over last year, thanks to strong demand and our international push. And speaking of global expansion, in 2022, we bought Owndays, a big Japanese eyewear chain. But we acquired only 93%, with an agreement to buy the rest later.

That remaining stake basically sat on our books as a liability — money we’d have to pay minority shareholders eventually. Now, accounting rules say that we have to revalue such liabilities every year based on current market value.

This year, we bought another 4%. And when we revalued the remaining liability, its value dropped a lot. Meaning, we’d likely need to pay less than what we estimated earlier. That drop counts as a profit on paper, even though no cash actually came in. That one adjustment alone added ₹167 crore to profits in FY25.

Shark 1: Wait… that’s more than half your total profit!

Gupta: Yes.

Shark 1: So without that, your real profit is what… ₹130 crore?

Gupta: Not exactly. We also earned ₹8 crore because of favourable exchange rates abroad. That could go up or down in future. And we booked ₹14 crore as deferred tax credit. Basically, we had set aside more for taxes earlier but ended up paying less. So we recognised that difference as profit.

Shark 3: Okay. But then how do you justify this valuation? This is your first profitable year since you started in 2008. Revenue is growing at 20–30%, but most of the profit this year came from accounting adjustments. And you want a ₹70,000 crore valuation, which is nearly 10 times your sales and 230 times your earnings?!

Bansal: Look, there’s no listed peer like us. Traditional rivals like Titan Eye+, GKB, Lawrence & Mayo, and Vision Express are far behind with at least 65% lower revenue than ours in India. And we’re building future-tech — smart glasses, audio eyewear, AI-powered products. We already have a partnership with Qualcomm for next-gen smart glasses.

*Bansal and Gupta smile nervously*

Shark 1: So you’re asking us to pay a premium based on future potential. I like the vision, but I’m sorry, it feels too aspirational at this stage. So I’m out.

And that wraps up our little Shark Tank episode. But here’s the real takeaway.

Lenskart’s last private valuation was around ₹8,700 crore in July this year. Now, just a few months later, it’s asking the public markets to value it at nearly 10 times that. That jump feels… ambitious.

Sure, Lenskart is unique. It controls everything from making the lenses to delivering the glasses. And the eyewear market in India has massive potential. As of FY25, 770 million Indians needed vision correction. That’s 53% of the country. And by 2030, 940 million people will need glasses. That’s nearly 6 in 10 Indians, thanks to more screen time, pollution, and an ageing population. But even though so many people need eye-care, only about 35% of the population actually wears prescription glasses. In developed countries like the US and Japan, that number is anywhere between 69% and 88%.

That’s a huge gap. And Lenskart wants to close it through remote eye tests, more stores, and awareness. It has just 4% market share right now, which means there’s a lot of room for growth. And it wants to be accessible across price points, whether it’s the sub-₹2,000 category or the ₹10,000-plus category, which surprisingly contribute equally to revenue.

Sounds exciting, we know. But there’s a catch.

A major portion (₹5,128 crores) of the ₹7,278 crore IPO will go to promoters selling their stake through an offer for sale. Only ₹2,150 crores will go towards business growth. The promoter holding will also drop from 20% to 17.5% after the IPO, which may not be terrible. But it does suggest that the promoters are happily cashing in when they can, while you and I are being shown the big vision story.

On that note, we’d like to end with a statement Peyush Bansal gave to The Arc: “There is a lot of opaqueness in the eyewear space. No pun intended. There is only 5-10% reality, and 90% is just showcasing and marketing…” We hope this isn’t true for the pitch Lenskart has made to capital-market investors. Although, the valuations, as we saw, scream so.

Until then…

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