Nitin Chhabra On Raising 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.

Nitin’s company, ace turtle, has secured funding from top-tier investors like CapitaLand, Vertex Ventures, SBI Investment Co. Ltd., Farglory, and Lesing Nine.

In this episode, you will learn:

• 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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About Nitin Chhabra:

Nitin Chhabra is the current CEO of Ace Turtle with over 20 years of experience in the fashion and lifestyle industry.

Nitin holds a PGDBM from Apeejay School of Management in the field of Business, Management, Marketing, and Related Support Services. He also holds a B.Com from the University of Delhi in Business/Commerce, General.

Nitin has completed their Higher Secondary schooling from Mount Saint Mary’s and also holds a PGDBM from St. Xavier’s School, Chandigarh, in the field of Marketing.

Connect with Nitin Chhabra:

• LinkedIn
• Crunchbase
• TheOrg
• RocketReach

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: Alrighty, hello everyone, and welcome to the DealMaker Show. Today, we have a really exciting founder joining us—a truly remarkable journey.

Nitin Chhabra: Thank you.

Alejandro Cremades: He’s been at it for over a decade with his company. In the startup world, that’s like a hundred years in corporate terms. So, we’re going to hear a lot of stories—about building, scaling, financing, and more.

Whether it’s on the equity side or the debt side, it’s very exciting. He’ll share his journey: how he started as a non-tech co-founder, how he recruited the early team, how he raised capital, and how he made the leap from corporate life to entrepreneurship—leaving behind some of the most lucrative salary packages at the time.

Again, everything was learned during the journey over many years. So brace yourself for a very inspiring conversation today. Without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Nitin Chhabra.

Alejandro Cremades: Welcome to the show.

Nitin Chhabra: Thank you so much, Alejandro, and thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Alejandro Cremades: So, originally born in Punjab, but I know you moved quite early in life. Walk us through memory lane—how was life growing up for you?

Nitin Chhabra: Yes, you’re right. I was born in a city called Jalandhar, which is in the state of Punjab in northern India. Very early on, I moved to Delhi because my father was a banker and got transferred frequently due to his job.

I grew up in Delhi. I did my schooling, graduation, and master’s there. I also started working in Delhi.

I was fortunate enough to start my career with Unilever India. It’s a very different business from what I’m doing today, but I learned a lot from that company.

It was a great company to have on your resume early in your career. At one of the gatherings at Unilever, I met the head of PR and communications, whose son was visiting from Bangalore. He happened to be the head of recruitment at a company called Arvind, which at that time was considered a pioneer in fashion retail.

The company had a background in textiles and was planning forward integration into fashion retail. We got talking.

He told me, “Why don’t you meet me tomorrow? I’ll take you around and show you what retail is all about. We can have a discussion if you like it.” I visited a few stores with him.

It was very interesting to me. And before I knew it, within two weeks, I was sitting across from the CEO of the company. Fortunately for me, they hired me—and that’s how my journey into fashion retail began.

I started in Delhi, but within the first six months, they moved me to Bangalore, which was their head office.

I spent about eight years there—slightly more, actually. Then, my boss, who was the CEO at that time, left to join another company to set up a fashion retail business. He asked me to join him. I became part of the founding team of that business.

This was with India’s largest company in oil and gas, which was diversifying into retail. They were also entering telecom and other large sectors. It remains India’s largest company by both market cap and revenue even today.

It was interesting because we thought, “Okay, we get to build something of our own,” but the usual capital and infrastructure challenges would be taken care of, given the company’s massive resources.

I worked with them for close to five years. Toward the end of my journey there, I started feeling like the job wasn’t challenging enough anymore.

Alejandro Cremades: What do you think was causing that?

Nitin Chhabra: I felt like we were using the same playbook over and over again. The brand names kept changing, but the work was repetitive. At that time, we were focused on the premium end of the fashion market—bistro luxury, luxury brands, and high-street premium brands.

The challenge in India was mostly around how to grow. The business was mostly offline, and quality retail real estate was hard to come by. Even where it existed, the surrounding infrastructure made it difficult for consumers to have a good shopping experience in malls or high streets.

So that curtailed our growth. We had multiple brands and businesses, but none were scaling enough. Around that time, e-commerce started to show early signs of success, and that was very fascinating for me.

I still remember one of the early fashion e-commerce platforms in India—Myntra. They were a vertical player focused only on fashion.

They came to us asking for one of our brands. I asked about their average selling price (ASP), and it was about $10. But the brand they were interested in had a starting price of around $80.

So I thought, “How will this work?”

But they were confident, and I decided to test it out. We didn’t get large volumes, but we received orders from small cities—tier 2 and tier 3 towns—not even in the 15-year business plan of that brand.

That was eye-opening. It showed me that there were customers all over India, but they were scattered. Traditional offline retail couldn’t reach them effectively. E-commerce could.

At the same time, India was going through a brand awareness revolution. People didn’t understand brands well yet. So the touch and feel of a brand still mattered to consumers.

We realized we needed a combination of both online and offline. In my role, I handled multiple responsibilities, including joint ventures and international business development.

This allowed me to meet leadership teams from international brands—both European and American. They shared how e-commerce was impacting their businesses. Some were excited, some concerned, and some dismissed it as a fad.

That was fascinating to me. On my travels, I spent time meeting people in the e-commerce and tech enablement sectors. I realized that online and offline integration was the answer for India.

At that time, the term “omnichannel” didn’t exist—it was coined later by McKinsey or someone else. But our thought process was to combine online and offline: online for reach, and offline for touch and feel.

As online-driven clusters became significant, we could open physical stores there.

Initially, we thought about starting a consumer business, but it required a lot more capital. So we pivoted to enterprise tech.

We figured everyone would eventually jump on this trend, just like during the gold rush. The people who made money sold shovels.

So we decided to be in the business of selling shovels—building technology for brands and retailers to integrate online and offline. That’s how we started our SaaS business.

Alejandro Cremades: So that’s how ACE came about, right?

Nitin Chhabra: That’s right—that’s how ACE was born.

Alejandro Cremades: What year was that, just to give people context?

Nitin Chhabra: This was 2014. That’s when we started. Retail in India was still in its infancy.

Most of us came from mature industries—like I came from FMCG. Others came from consumer goods or different sectors. We’d often meet and exchange notes because the retail sector was still very young.

As a result, it wasn’t difficult for us to reach any CEO at the time. We had all grown in our careers and held leadership roles across various retail companies. So access was easier.

Alejandro Cremades: For people listening to really understand—what ended up being the business model of ACE? How do you guys make money?

Nitin Chhabra: Initially, our business model was based on software-as-a-service (SaaS). We approached companies—not consumers—and offered them our technology.

But the response we got was, “This hasn’t been done here before. We don’t know if it will succeed.” At that time, Amazon had already entered the Indian market, and Flipkart had scaled up.

Nitin Chhabra: So they said, “Okay, there are already large players here. Are you talking about us competing with them?” We would explain, “No, that’s not what we’re talking about. What we’re saying is that you’ll be where your customers want to reach you. You’ll be present everywhere—both online and offline. We’ll help you do that.”

So it was very new for the market and for the teams on the other side, within the retail companies. So we thought, “Okay, why don’t we do a model where we keep a very low subscription fee, almost like a flow, and then also keep a revenue share—whichever is higher.”

We kept a very small revenue share as a portion of the GMV that we generated through the platform. We chose this model because it was something new, and they felt reassured knowing they didn’t have to pay too much for it.

We didn’t charge any setup fee. We just wanted to get customers on board. They were happy to give us a small, tiny portion of the business that we enabled for them. So that’s how we kind of started off.

Alejandro Cremades: Now I know that for you guys—and especially in your case—you were really experiencing the problem for quite some time. You had exposure to retail, to fashion, so you really understood the problem well. But you were a senior guy trying to convince other senior guys to take a pay cut. You were all among the highest-paid folks in corporate, so making that jump was quite the risk.

How did you go about recruiting the founding team? And what do you think it took for them to really be at peace with the idea of jumping into the unknown?

Nitin Chhabra: I think the first thing for me was to find a co-founder, because I wanted someone alongside me, someone who could shoulder the journey with me. I met a lot of my friends in retail, but they weren’t very convinced.

Like you said, everyone was getting paid very well at that point in time, and they weren’t willing to make that jump because they had a comfortable paycheck every month. So why take the risk?

At that point, there were no known exits. Raising money was also not very easy, and the venture capital environment was still at a very early stage.

So they were all hesitant to join. Then I spoke to one of my colleagues. I had prepared a pitch in my mind—how I would convince him to join me as a co-founder. I laid out the whole thing for him.

I still remember he asked me, “Okay, how much money will we make?” I said, “We’re not going to get paid anything—for the first year for sure. I don’t know how long that will last. So we’ll have to run through our savings.”

It was a zero-sum game. Either we would be very successful, or we’d have to shut this down in a year or year and a half. And surprisingly, he jumped at it.

So Barry is now the co-founder of ACE. He joined me from day zero.

Then, the right question you asked was: how do we go about recruiting, especially when both of us were non-tech founders building a tech company?

Not having worked in tech, not coming from a tech background—how do we recruit people in tech?

Unfortunately, in the first year, we made a lot of mistakes in recruitment.

We raised a bit of angel money from friends and family because our friends were doing well.

They largely didn’t understand what we were trying to do, but they put money on us. So we took some angel money and hired people from very large companies—people from places like IBM.

We also hired people from large service companies in India—tech service companies.

That was our initial team. But very quickly, we realized that this was the biggest mistake we made. In large companies like IBM, people work on very small pieces.

They aren’t really building something new. They work in large teams, and there’s no hustle. It’s a very different culture.

On the other hand, in service companies, the model relies on man-hours—it’s like a body-shopping business.

They charge by the hour and aren’t really into building something. They focus more on integration and services around tech.

So we had to let go of the entire team. Then I met with other tech founders and tried to understand how to hire the right set of people.

We understood that the kind of people we needed—those who could build something new that didn’t exist—weren’t going to be in large companies like IBM or in service companies. These guys are builders. They love to create.

So I made the effort to get into those circles—to connect with those types of builders and try to convince them, try to sell them the dream.

Fortunately, the first two or three people we brought on were great.

And now, of course, like most founders would say, once you get the A-players, they bring in more A-players. That’s how we built the entire initial team.

And that’s how we kind of started off.

Alejandro Cremades: I guess, in this case for you guys, you’ve been at it for over 11 years now. What was the moment where you felt like you were turning a corner—where you and your co-founder thought, “Hey, maybe we’re going to start getting paid from this thing”?

Nitin Chhabra: Yeah, I think it was in the second year when the revenue became reasonable enough for us to start paying ourselves. Nowhere close to our corporate salaries, but at least some money—because by then we had run through most of our savings.

Fortunately, around that time, revenue started to come in. Since we were very early in the game, we had good success early on.

We got more clients and became market leaders very quickly—though the business was still small, because the market itself was still small at that time. Not the opportunity, but the active market was small.

Then we were approached by EY’s investment banking team via LinkedIn.

They said, “Are you looking to raise money?” We said, “Okay, we’ve never done that—just raised angel money—but how about you help us raise some?”

So they became our first investment bankers. Then we set out to raise our Series A.

When we raised our Series A, that money helped us accelerate. We wanted to enlarge our development team on the tech side.

We wanted to hire better customer service and customer success folks, and we wanted to bring on good salespeople. That funding gave us the resources to scale further.

We scaled up quite rapidly. At that point, we hit a revenue of $10 million USD ARR, which was by far the largest. And we were focused solely on India at the time.

We were the largest in our space by far. Other companies tried to copy our model—by then, the term “omnichannel” had become quite in vogue.

Most of those companies were led by tech founders. But many of them didn’t survive.

I think we were able to grow faster partly because we were early movers and learned quickly.

Also, we came from retail, so we understood the retail pain points—why adoption matters, where failure is likely.

Retail operations teams are extremely busy. If they’re required to do more tasks that increase their workload, that’s a problem.

So everything had to be far more automated. That’s how we built the platform. Our domain understanding definitely helped, along with the early mover advantage.

So the business was doing great.

And then the pandemic happened.

During the first lockdown in India, things were brutal. The government wanted to use the entire logistics infrastructure for essentials and medicine.

So they banned all non-essential shipments.

As I mentioned, we were relying on a small revenue share to acquire clients.

Most of our clients refused to pay us. There was no new business because no shipping was happening to consumers.

As a result, we had an existential crisis.

If not for our investors, I don’t think we would have survived that period.

Then came the second lockdown. When it lifted, the government eased regulations, allowing non-essentials to be shipped again.

Suddenly, our business scaled to a different orbit. Everybody wanted to get onto our platform—we were the market leaders.

Often, the leadership at retail companies didn’t understand the tech, but they recognized the brands we worked with. So logos became very important. They thought, “If these guys can handle these brands, they can handle our business too.”

So we got a fairly good number of clients.

Then, some of our old clients who had been with us for a while came back to renegotiate the commercials. They said, “Okay, now we can’t work on a revenue-share basis. Let’s reduce the revenue share or move to a subscription-only model because we never expected this business to grow so much—and now it’s hurting our bottom line.”

That got me thinking—there was clearly a gap in our business or revenue model. If 100% of your revenue relies on third parties, and those third parties don’t pay on time—as happened during the pandemic—you can be wiped out.

On the other hand, when things are going great, they all want to renegotiate.

So we thought: some part of the business needs to be captive to us. That way, if a crisis happens again, we won’t be dependent solely on third parties for survival.

During that period—right after the second lockdown—the world was in chaos.

Retail, especially, was struggling.

Most of our clients were global brands that had scaled up in India and were early adopters of our platform.

They were struggling in their home markets.

So we made a list of our clients and thought, “Why don’t we approach them and tell them, ‘You’re suffering losses in India…’”

Nitin Chhabra: Why don’t we take over your business? Because we came from retail and we had built a tech platform enabling omnichannel, we thought—let’s do what we learned earlier. We would take over the business of some of our clients and scale it the way it needs to be scaled today, because consumers had evolved.

The pandemic had become a huge accelerant—consumers in metros and larger cities were consuming the same content that consumers in smaller tier-two and tier-three towns were also consuming. Those consumers were now actually on the same page, on the same platforms, in terms of content consumption as those from larger cities.

So, we could see these shifts happening. Traditional methods of doing business weren’t working anymore. We felt there would be no better way and no better time than this to approach retail companies and brands and say: “We’ll take over your business.”

So we approached them. Fortunately for us, the first two brands agreed—largely because they were making huge losses in their India businesses, and similarly in their China and North America operations, which were their main focus.

They said, “Okay, at least one problem goes away. We’ll focus on the larger markets.” So we took over the business. We assured them they would get a guaranteed royalty from us every year. That way, they were always in profit. All the risk and all the investment would come from us.

We went back to the board and told them this is what we were looking to do. That was a very interesting conversation because all our investors were tech investors, and now we were telling them: “You invested in a tech business, and now we also want to move into retail.”

At that point, the business model was: we would continue our SaaS business, which had crossed $10 million ARR, and also have this new business that used the same tech we had built. That would be the synergy. And this new business would be captive to us.

Because we were the India licensees of these brands, the entire revenue would come to us. We wouldn’t have to depend on third parties for revenue. So if a pandemic-like event happened again, we wouldn’t be at risk the way we had been before.

The board agreed. We launched with a business plan that we had aligned with the retail brands—outlining what we would achieve in a specific timeframe.

What we had planned to do over three years, we managed to achieve in the first eight months. We always knew that adoption was a problem for retailers, because they are structured a certain way. They have legacy systems and processes, and it’s difficult for them to change.

But I think we grossly underestimated the power of adoption. When we used our tech and enforced adoption in the business, it scaled very, very fast.

At the same time, we also saw new problems. We had been solving only the omnichannel commerce problem.

But there were problems on the design side, on the distribution side, and on the supply chain side. The whole industry was still operating with very traditional methods.

We could clearly see a role for tech to play there as well. Tech could make everything far more efficient, scalable, and—most importantly—repeatable.

We could sign new brands and repeat the same playbook again and again. At the same time, we also had offline stores opening for these brands. And in the offline world, unlike online, you only get customer data when the customer shops from you. Before that, you don’t know the journey, unlike online.

So we said, “Okay, we have to understand the customer journey inside offline stores too.”

We had to understand how retail operations were being handled manually—and figure out how to digitize them, so we could get data points for everything.

Then we decided to let go of the SaaS business. That wasn’t an easy conversation with the board. But we told them we were going to let go of the SaaS business and have our entire tech and engineering bandwidth focus on solving these new problems, which we felt were important for us to scale further.

Fortunately for us, the board supported us. And we moved from being just a SaaS player to being retailers.

We used our entire bandwidth to start solving the new problems we had identified—and we started going deeper.

So that’s been an interesting journey.

Alejandro Cremades: That’s really spectacular. I mean, the way you’re able to make those decisions and learn along the way—obviously, as you mentioned, the board placed a bet on you. You raised $49 million in equity and debt.

It has been quite the journey. I’m sure that during those 11 years, there were a lot of lessons learned. If I were to put you in a time machine and bring you back to the moment when you were thinking about leaving your corporate career to start something of your own—and if you could give that younger Nitin one piece of advice before launching—what would that be and why, given what you know now?

Nitin Chhabra: If it’s fine with you, maybe I’ll share about five things that we’ve learned from the beginning until now. And if I had to do it all over again, these are the things I would put far more emphasis on—things that worked out for us. If that’s fine, Alejandro, I’ll take that approach.

Alejandro Cremades: Please.

Nitin Chhabra: Thank you. So I think the first thing is the hiring strategy. That’s the most important. In a startup, you’re always running ahead of your resources. Resources are limited, and you want to grow exponentially. Capital is always a challenge.

So resources become incredibly important. What we learned is that the key to a good hiring strategy is to identify the roles that matter most for you to succeed. That could be anything. For those roles, hire the best people.

If you have a lot of capital, sure, you can hire the best people across the board. But that’s not realistic. So, hire the best people in the most critical roles. These roles might be 3, 4, or 10, depending on how you’re building the business.

For non-core roles—which will be the majority of the people you hire—bring on folks who are early in their careers, with two to four years of experience. People who are flexible, don’t have much to lose, and are hungry to grow. Hire for attitude. Those are the ones you can mold.

That strategy definitely worked for us, and that’s what we learned over time.

The second aspect is about raising your Series A. The most important thing is: who is leading your Series A?

That investor will likely be on your cap table the longest. We were fortunate to get Vertex as our Series A lead. At the time, we didn’t fully realize the importance of that decision—but later we did.

It’s not just about the money. It’s about their ability to guide you. At Series A, your model isn’t yet repeatable—you’re still trying to figure it out.

When challenges like the pandemic arise, you’re not just worried about your business, but also about your team, whose livelihood depends on the salaries you pay. And suddenly, your revenues become zero.

Our investors supported us—not just with capital, but also emotionally. They were emotional pillars for us.

As the business evolves and you go to raise your next round, they continue to guide you.

So choose your Series A investor wisely. Spend time with the partner—likely the managing director—who will be working with you. Take references. Understand how much time they’ll be able to spend with you.

If the fund is investing in too many companies and that MD can’t dedicate enough time, they might not be the right investors for you.

That’s a very important lesson we learned.

The third lesson is about working capital. When we entered the retail side of the business, working capital became very important because—unlike software—we were now investing in inventory.

So it became crucial to understand the difference between profit & loss and cash flow.

A lot of people focus only on the P&L, but not on cash flow. That can hit you hard down the line. Understanding that difference is very, very important.

The fourth piece is networking. It’s incredibly important to meet peers and people from other industries.

For example, every Saturday, from about 11:30 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., I meet with founders and others—maybe from different industries, maybe from corporate backgrounds.

The more people you meet, the more you learn. And over time, you build a network.

When someone needs help, all it takes is a call or a connection. I’ve seen that 9 out of 10 people you help will come back to help you when you need something—even if you don’t ask.

So networking has definitely worked for us.

And the last piece: take care of your fitness. If you’re not physically fit, you won’t be able to give your best to your company.

The founder’s fitness is very, very important.

These are a few high-level lessons we’ve learned—and that have stood by us.

Alejandro Cremades: I love that. I love that. Well, Nitin, it’s been an absolute honor to have you. For the people listening who would love to reach out and say hi, or perhaps learn more about ACE, what would be the best way to go about that?

Nitin Chhabra: I think they could reach out to me on LinkedIn. That would be a great way to get in touch. I always respond there.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Nitin, thank you so much for being on the DealMaker Show today. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us.

Nitin Chhabra: Thank you so much, Alejandro. It was lovely speaking with you. Thank you so much for having me here.

Alejandro Cremades: Thank you.

*****

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