Nuvah Raises ₹4 Crore to Engineer Heels That Don't Hurt

Nuvah sells heels that start at ₹4,000 and are built around a footbed the company says it redesigned 24 times before it was satisfied.

It has raised ₹4 crore in a pre-seed angel round. Founder Avni Jain started the company in October 2025, which makes this a round closed inside the first year, and she came to it from venture capital, McKinsey and Goldman Sachs by way of IIM Ahmedabad.

The money goes into research and development, the footbed technology, and testing ways to reach customers.

The investor list is the most informative part of this announcement

The release names three angels and leaves it there. Who they are says more than the amount does.

Amit Jain is co-founder and chief executive of CarDekho. Shantanu Deshpande founded Bombay Shaving Company and has built an angel portfolio concentrated in consumer and retail. Ishendra Agarwal founded GIVA, the D2C jewellery brand.

Agarwal is the one whose company most resembles what Nuvah is attempting. GIVA started in 2019 selling silver jewellery to Indian women online, in a price band that begins around ₹1,000, and has since grown into hundreds of physical stores. That is close to the path a D2C footwear brand at ₹4,000 a pair would need to walk.

Two of the three are already connected. Amit Jain sits on Bombay Shaving Company's board alongside Deshpande, so this is less a set of three independent verdicts than a cluster of consumer operators who know each other.

What 24 prototypes tells you, and what it does not

The company says SteadyForm, its footbed, went through 24 prototypes and more than 900 hours of wear testing, and that it responds to shifting pressure across the foot.

Those are measures of effort rather than measures of outcome. They tell you a team took the problem seriously and iterated, which is genuinely more than most fashion brands do. They do not tell you whether a woman wearing the shoe for nine hours finds it comfortable.

Comfort is a claim only the wearer can settle.

The numbers that will answer it are return rates and repeat purchase. In footwear both are unusually revealing, because a shoe that hurts gets worn once and never again, and the customer rarely complains, she simply does not come back. If Nuvah's engineering works, that will show up as a return rate below the category norm long before it shows up in a press release.

"Women have long been conditioned to accept discomfort as the cost of wearing heels. Nuvah was founded to challenge this belief. We are not merely adapting a global product, we are engineering footwear for Indian women, designed for how we move, work, and live," said Avni Jain, founder and CEO of Nuvah.

Footwear is the hardest thing to sell online

This is where ₹4 crore starts to look thin, and the reason is arithmetic rather than ambition. A single heel design is not one product, it is a size run. Seven or eight sizes for one style in one colour, each an individual stock-keeping unit that has to be manufactured, held and eventually sold or discounted. Add a second colourway and the count doubles. A proprietary footbed makes it heavier still, because a custom component means tooling paid for upfront, before a single pair is sold, and tooling costs the same whether the style succeeds or fails. Inventory written down at the end of a season is the cost that quietly ends most footwear brands.

Then there is fit. Clothing forgives approximation and jewellery mostly ignores it, but a shoe half a size wrong is unwearable, which is why footwear carries some of the highest return rates in online retail and why so many D2C brands eventually open stores. GIVA now runs hundreds of them. A comfort claim makes the problem sharper, not softer, because comfort is the one thing a customer cannot assess from a photograph.

The market case

The company points to an IIFL Securities report from October 2024 putting India's per-capita footwear consumption at about 1.9 pairs, against a global average near 3 and more than 6 in developed markets, and forecasting branded women's footwear to grow at roughly 15% a year over the next decade.

Nuvah sells pan-India through its own D2C channel and plans a festive collection for Navratri. Over three to five years it says it wants to be India's leading lifestyle footwear brand for working women. Among Indian footwear brands that is a crowded ambition, and the engineering claim is the only thing that separates it from the rest of the shelf.

Common questions

Who invested in Nuvah?

The ₹4 crore pre-seed angel round was backed by CarDekho co-founder Amit Jain, Bombay Shaving Company founder Shantanu Deshpande, GIVA founder Ishendra Agarwal and others.

What is SteadyForm?

Nuvah's proprietary footbed, which the company says adapts to shifting pressure across the foot and was developed through 24 prototypes and over 900 hours of wear testing.

How much do Nuvah heels cost?

Products start at ₹4,000 and are sold pan-India through the company's own direct-to-consumer channel.

Round size, investor names, product claims, pricing and quotes come from the company's announcement of September 2026. The footwear consumption and growth figures are attributed by the company to an IIFL Securities report of October 2024. Investor affiliations were confirmed independently.