He Raised Over $50 Million To Build India’s Leading Tech-Native Retail Company, Specializing In Omnichannel Retail For Brands

In the world of startups, a decade feels like a lifetime, and Nitin Chhabra lived it all. From leaving behind a prestigious corporate career with Unilever and Reliance Brands to building one of India’s leading omnichannel commerce platforms, his journey reflects conviction, timing, and resilience.

In this exciting interview, Nitin discusses his experiences raising capital on the equity and debt sides. He also reveals how he recruited his team despite being a non-tech founder and how he made the difficult decision of quitting an impressive regular paycheck to start a company.

Listen to the full podcast interview and review the transcript here.

From Corporate Comfort to Startup Chaos

Born in Jalandhar in Punjab, a state in northern India, Nitin’s career began in Delhi, after being raised in a banker’s household that frequently moved across Indian cities. He did his schooling, graduation, and Master’s in Delhi.

After cutting his teeth at Hindustan Unilever Ltd., a company he credits with laying the groundwork for structured thinking, Nitin transitioned into fashion retail with the fashion retailing unit of Ahmedabad-based Arvind LTD., a major textile brand entering the retail space in Bangalore.

Over eight years, Nitin grew deep roots in the industry before being tapped to join a founding team within Reliance Brands Ltd., a unit of India’s largest conglomerate, that primarily deals in global high-end labels, to build out their fashion retail arm.

At the time, the parent company, Reliance Industries Ltd., was the largest company in India in terms of market cap and revenues, operating in the oil and gas and telecom sectors. After working for five years with the company, Nitin was ready to move on and look for something more challenging.

Looking for New Challenges

Looking back, Nitin recalls that he felt Reliance Brands was a typical playbook, where brand names kept changing, but he was doing the same thing. His company was focused on the premium end of the fashion market and targeted bridge-to-luxury, luxury, and high-street, high-premium brands.

At the time, growth strategies in India were very challenging because business was mostly offline, and retail real estate was hard to come by and expensive. Whatever quality retail real estate they had did not come with the surrounding infrastructure conducive to an exceptional shopping experience.

This factor seemed to curtail their growth, and despite multiple brands and businesses operating in the space, they weren’t scaling adequately. Around that time, e-commerce started to show some interesting results.

A Lightbulb Moment Through E-Commerce

The turning point came when Myntra approached Nitin’s team to onboard a premium brand onto their platform. Myntra was one of the early fashion retailers focused entirely on e-commerce.

Myntra is currently owned by Walmart, which snapped it up as part of its $16B acquisition of Flipkart in 2018. When Nitin asked them about their average selling price (ASP), they converted it into US dollars and said, “$10.”

The brand Myntra asked for had a starting price of nearly $80. Initially skeptical, especially given the stark difference in average selling prices, Nitin was surprised to see orders trickling in from Tier 2 and 3 towns across India, which weren’t in the company’s 15-year business plan.

That moment revealed a truth: India’s aspiring customers were everywhere, but traditional offline retail store models couldn’t efficiently reach them. However, e-commerce could be a way to reach those customers.

At the time, Indian customers were experiencing a revolution in discovering top brands, so they wanted to touch and feel fabrics to understand them. Nitin realized that offline stores would be equally important, and they needed a strategy that could combine the two.

Understanding the Advantages of eCommerce

As a senior executive at Reliance Brands, Nitin not only headed joint ventures with businesses, including global brands like Brooks Brothers, Iconix International, and Thomas Pink, but was also responsible for international business development.

His job description included forming joint ventures or long-term partnerships with global brands to launch them in India. As a result, Nitin had the opportunity to meet the leadership of European and American global brands.

They shared their experiences of how e-commerce had impacted their business and the challenges they encountered. He also learned about their positive and negative perceptions.

Fascinated by the concepts, Nitin spent time during his travels connecting with people on the tech side and the tech enablement side of e-commerce. Although the technology existed in India, companies weren’t focused on that aspect of the business then.

The “Omnichannel Commerce” Concept

This sparked the idea for a business model solution that could blend offline touchpoints with online scalability. It would later come to be known as “omnichannel commerce.”

Nitin could foresee how online sales would allow them to reach their scattered customer base in a large country like India. At the same time, the touch and feel could come through offline stores. Once the online clusters became large enough, they could start setting up stores in their locations.

Nitin envisioned a future where brands could serve customers wherever they were, whether at the mall, on the street, or on their smartphones.

This was especially true in India, where customers were rapidly adopting smartphones and becoming the primary gateways for the internet and digital commerce in most of the country.

Most citizens skipped desktops to go straight to smartphones, so India was increasingly becoming a mobile-first commerce market for e-commerce players, unlike in the US, where consumers started purchasing online through desktops.

Although an excellent strategy, Nitin could see that it would require a significant capital injection. His solution? An enterprise tech business to capitalize on the e-commerce concept.

Nitin came up with the idea of selling technology to brands and retailers that wanted to integrate online and offline, and working with these brands to help them. That’s how he started his Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business–the genesis of ace turtle Services.

Betting on SaaS—and Selling Shovels

When Nitin co-founded ace turtle in 2014, he decided not to sell fashion to consumers directly but to empower brands with the tools to do it themselves. “If there’s a gold rush,” he quipped, “we want to sell the shovels.”

The model was simple but smart: offer SaaS tools to retailers to unify their online and offline inventory, experience, and customer engagement. Instead of charging hefty setup fees, they charged a low subscription fee plus a revenue share.

This strategy helped lower the barrier to adoption and tied ace turtle’s success to the success of its clients.

Making the Leap from a Well-Paying Job to Entrepreneurship

Looking back, Nitin recalls being in a senior position at Reliance Brands, and quitting a well-paying job required some soul-searching.

He needed a co-founder, but exiting a lucrative job or raising money for a company were novel concepts at that time. The venture capital sphere was still in its nascent stages.

Nitin’s friends and colleagues hesitated to join him, but Brinder Pal (Berry) Singh was interested. After a quick presentation, Nitin explained that it would be a zero-sum game for the initial year or two. They would have to rely on their savings. Berry jumped right in.

But Nitin and Berry weren’t technologists. Recruiting tech talent without a tech background proved their first real challenge. Their early hires, mostly from large service firms, failed to meet the startup’s needs. The culture didn’t match. They needed builders.

Through trial and error and industry networking with other tech founders, they eventually assembled a team of mission-driven engineers who could build from scratch. The duo also raised funding from angel investors, family, and friends.

Surviving COVID and Reinventing the Model

ace turtle’s initial business model was to serve companies that wanted to purchase their software or SaaS solutions. However, their potential clients were skeptical since it hadn’t been done in India, and they were unsure if it would work.

Then again, large players like Amazon and Flipkart were already operating in the e-commerce marketplace, and competing with them would be highly challenging. In response, Nitin and Berry developed an innovative payment model that would cost clients a tiny portion of their business.

By year two, the company was generating enough revenue to pay modest salaries, and before long, ace turtle became a market leader in omnichannel SaaS in India, with $10M in annual recurring revenues (ARR). The company got more clients, but the market was still small.

Raising Funding for ace turtle

Around this time, Ernst & Young’s (EY) investment banking team approached Nitin and Berry on LinkedIn with an offer to assist with raising a series A funding. EY lined up investors like Singapore-based funds like Vertex Ventures and CapitaLand.

Using the money, the duo expanded the tech development team. For starters, ace turtle needed skilled talent to manage its customer service, customer success, and sales divisions.

Thanks to this capital injection, the company scaled rapidly, even though it was only focused on Indian markets. It also quickly beat emerging tech competitors.

Nitin explains that since he and Berry had a retail background, they understood retail pain points and the areas where they were most likely to fail. The duo also recognized the importance of automation since the retail operations team has too many tasks to deal with.

Their understanding of the domain proved to be a huge advantage.

Navigating the Challenges of the Pandemic

The pandemic almost wiped them out. With non-essential deliveries banned in India, their clients paused payments and the small revenue share they relied on. New business froze. “We had an existential crisis,” says Nitin.

If not for their supportive investors, ace turtle might have closed its doors. When lockdowns eased, demand surged, and retailers who once hesitated rushed to digitize and remain competitive.

Even though they did not understand the tech, they wanted to use the ace turtle platform because it was the market leader. But this rebound revealed something deeper. ace turtle’s entire revenue depended on third parties.

During downturns, clients might stop paying. In boom times, they renegotiated. The model needed more control, so Nitin and Berry decided to lower the revenue share and transition to the subscription fee only.

They had not anticipated that the business would grow so much, and the earlier model was costing them money. The second lockdown brought fresh challenges, particularly because most of their clients were global brands scaling in India.

These brands were the early adopters of the ace turtle platform but faced challenges in their larger and home markets. Seeing the losses they were facing, Nitin and Berry offered to take over their Indian divisions.

This was a great strategy because the duo, who had a retail background, knew how to scale the business and cater to evolving customer needs.

The pandemic actually became a significant accelerant because customers in the largest and smallest Tier 1 and 2 cities were consuming the same content via access to the same platform.

Nitin and Berry saw that traditional business methods were no longer effective. This was the opportune time to approach retail companies and brands with offers to acquire their Indian arms. Most accepted the offer because they were incurring huge losses.

Nitin and Berry offered them a yearly royalty amount so the sellers would make consistent profits. However, the risk and investment would remain with ace turtle. At the same time, since a Bangalore-based company held the Indian licenses of these brands, it would earn the entire revenue.

The company would no longer have to rely on third parties for revenue, a strategy that would insulate it against a pandemic-like event if one ever happened.

From SaaS to Retail Operator

Convincing the board, which was composed of tech investors, wasn’t easy, but the logic was sound. With the pandemic transforming consumer behavior across all cities, the opportunity was ripe.

The new model gave ace turtle complete control of revenue and operations, with royalties flowing back to the original brands. Their first few partnerships proved wildly successful. What was meant to take three years was achieved in eight months.

Still, new challenges emerged, such as design, distribution, and supply chains, which all relied on outdated systems. So ace turtle doubled down again, repurposing its tech team from SaaS into end-to-end retail enablement.

As a result, ace turtle could now repeat the same playbook. However, even though they had offline stores, gathering customer data and tracing their purchasing journey was only possible with online stores.

Nitin realized they needed to understand how the small operations worked manually and digitize them.

Letting Go of SaaS and Going All In

Eventually, Nitin made the hardest call yet: winding down the SaaS business to focus their entire tech engineering bandwidth on building a vertically integrated retail powerhouse. He wanted to solve the new problems they were facing, without which they couldn’t scale further.

With investor backing, they poured resources into digitizing offline stores, understanding customer purchasing behavior, and creating repeatable systems for scaling fashion brands in India. Nitn and Berry successfully raised $49M in a combination of equity and debt.

Storytelling is everything that Nitin Chhabra was able to master. The key is capturing the essence of what you are doing in 15 to 20 slides. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here), where the most critical slides are highlighted.

Remember to unlock the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below.

Today, ace turtle is the master franchisee of American brands in India, including Lee, Wrangler, Toys R Us, Babies R Us, and Dockers.

In Retrospect

Nitin talks about the five things that worked well for them when building ace turtle.

1. Their hiring strategy started with identifying the key roles crucial for business success and hiring the best people for these roles. They efficiently aligned their hiring with the capital they had available.
2. Their choice of investors who supported their series A round not just with money, but in terms of guidance when they were still building their model. Spending time with the managing director of the investment fund is crucial.
3. Their decision to enter the retail side of the business earned them critical working capital. It also helped them understand the business’s cash flow and profit-and-loss aspects.
4. Their networking strategies and meetings with people from different industries brought them valuable help when needed..
5. Taking care of personal fitness.

In Conclusion

Nitin Chhabra’s journey shows what it takes to leave a stable corporate job and build something bold from scratch.

By spotting early shifts in e-commerce, learning from global brands, and adapting quickly, especially during the pandemic, he turned ace turtle into a leading force in India’s retail-tech space. His story is a powerful example of staying flexible, thinking long-term, and building with purpose.

Listen to the full podcast episode to know more, including:

• Nitin left a high-paying corporate job at Reliance Brands to chase a vision of omnichannel retail, proving that breakthrough ideas often lie outside comfort zones.
• A simple conversation with Myntra uncovered the latent demand in Tier 2/3 cities, leading Nitin to envision the omnichannel model long before it became mainstream.
• Despite not having a technical background, Nitin and his co-founder successfully built a robust tech team through networking, trial and error, and relentless focus.
• During the COVID crisis, Nitin pivoted ace turtle from a SaaS model to becoming a retail operator, giving them revenue control and insulating the business from third-party dependencies.
• Raising a mix of equity and debt allowed ace turtle to scale sustainably while maintaining alignment between investor expectations and business growth.
• By acquiring brand licenses and offering royalty structures, Nitin aligned incentives while expanding ace turtle’s control and revenue base.
• The decision to shift away from SaaS and focus on building a vertically integrated retail tech stack allowed ace turtle to scale faster and smarter, paving the way for future growth.

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Keep in mind that storytelling is everything in fundraising. In this regard, for a winning pitch deck to help you, take a look at the template created by Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley legend (see it here), which I recently covered. Thiel was the first angel investor in Facebook with a $500K check that turned into more than $1 billion in cash. 

Remember to unlock for free the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below.

 

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