Avni Jain founded Nuvah, a comfort-engineered women’s heels brand, in Bengaluru in October 2025.
Nuvah was created around a straightforward product challenge: making high heels more comfortable without sacrificing the appearance and design associated with traditional heels.
The company’s approach focuses heavily on its proprietary footbed design, which Jain’s team reportedly iterated 24 times before settling on the current version.
Nuvah Raises ₹4 Crore Pre-Seed Round
This week, on September 22, 2026, Nuvah closed a ₹4 crore pre-seed angel round backed by three Indian consumer-startup founders.
The investors include CarDekho co-founder Amit Jain, Bombay Shaving Company founder Shantanu Deshpande and GIVA founder Ishendra Agarwal.
The backing gives Nuvah additional capital to continue developing its footwear technology and expand beyond its initial direct-to-consumer customer base.
For a young consumer brand, early funding can provide resources for product development, manufacturing, customer acquisition and testing different growth strategies.
Treating Comfort as an Engineering Problem
Jain’s approach to footwear is built around treating comfort as a product-engineering challenge rather than simply a branding exercise.
The company has invested in repeatedly testing and refining its footbed before bringing the current design to market.
That product-first strategy places Nuvah within a growing group of Indian direct-to-consumer companies attempting to differentiate themselves through product development.
India’s D2C sector has attracted increasing attention from angel investors, particularly founders who previously built successful consumer brands themselves.
Growing India’s D2C Footwear Market
Nuvah sits within a wider movement involving founder-led consumer startups across India.
Experienced entrepreneurs are increasingly investing their own capital and knowledge into younger companies, creating a cycle where successful founders become early backers of the next generation.
For Jain, the immediate challenge will be turning Nuvah’s product proposition into repeat customer demand while expanding beyond its initial direct-to-consumer base.
The new ₹4 crore funding round provides the company with additional resources for research and development, customer acquisition and expansion.
As Nuvah develops, its focus on comfort-focused high heels represents another example of Indian consumer startups using product design and technology to address specific gaps in established markets.
