Pee Safe: The Brand That Started With A UTI And Is Now Rewriting India’s Hygiene Story

Nobody builds a hygiene company by accident. But sometimes, the accident comes first.

In 2013, Vikas Bagaria and his wife Srijana were on a road trip somewhere across India when Srijana felt unwell. What followed was a diagnosis that affects an estimated 150 million Indian women every year: a Urinary Tract Infection, contracted after using a public restroom. It is a condition that is painful, preventable, and almost never discussed openly in polite company.

That experience became the founding idea. The company itself, when it was formally incorporated, was co-founded by Vikas Bagaria and Rithish Kumar, a partnership that combined Bagaria’s entrepreneurial track record with Kumar’s complementary skills in building and scaling the business.

A self-described serial entrepreneur with more than two decades of experience building businesses from scratch, Bagaria had never worked in hygiene or healthcare before that road trip. He had built SafetyKart, a safety products company. He had other ventures behind him. What he did not have, before that trip, was a clear problem worth his next decade.

After Srijana’s illness, he started researching. What he found was, on reflection, obvious: India’s public hygiene infrastructure was, and remains, deeply inadequate. The specific habit of using a toilet seat sanitizer, standard practice across much of the developed world, barely existed as a product category in India. The concept of a quick-spray, alcohol-based sanitizer for toilet seats, something a woman could carry in her bag and use before sitting down in a public restroom, was not something anyone had commercialised for the Indian market at scale.

Vikas made one. Tested it with friends and family for three years. Then in April 2017, officially launched Pee Safe under Redcliffe Hygiene Pvt. Ltd. The first product: a clinically approved, isopropyl alcohol-based toilet seat sanitizer in aerosol form, quick-drying, pocket-sized, and priced to be genuinely accessible.

The early marketing was just as unconventional as the product. Bagaria personally reached out to communities, did grassroots education about public hygiene risks, and watched as word-of-mouth did the rest. There were no celebrity endorsements in the first phase. Just a product solving a real problem for women who had been dealing with it in silence for their entire lives.

What Pee Safe Became

The toilet seat sanitizer was never going to be the whole story. From the beginning, the founders understood that the hygiene category for women in India was deeply underserved across multiple dimensions, not just in public restrooms but in the entire arc of a woman’s relationship with her body: menstruation, intimate health, grooming, sexual wellness, maternity. Each of these categories shared the same structural problem: products that were either unavailable, unaffordable, poorly formulated, or simply never marketed in a way that acknowledged women as intelligent consumers capable of making informed choices.

Pee Safe’s product expansion strategy followed that insight methodically. The brand moved into menstrual care: eco-friendly sanitary pads, organic tampons, menstrual cups, and panty liners, building a range that gave women options across price points and material preferences. It launched intimate washes and wipes for both men and women. It added stretch mark oil, maternity pads, breast pads, and breast pumps to serve women through pregnancy. And then it built sub-brands to carry the categories that warranted their own identity.

FURR arrived as Pee Safe’s grooming and personal care sub-brand, built around sustainable, skin-friendly formulations covering hair removal, skincare, and body care. Domina followed as the sexual wellness brand, designed to remove the shame and awkwardness that have historically made this category inaccessible for most Indian consumers. Both sub-brands are operated under the Pee Safe parent but marketed with their own distinct identities, allowing the company to serve very different purchase occasions and retail environments without forcing consumers to associate all of it with a single brand experience.

“Since its inception, Pee Safe has emerged as a brand that is disrupting the hygiene ecosystem,” Bagaria has said, “and has grown to become the house of safe offering complete health and wellness solutions.”

Today, that house of safe includes products spanning toilet hygiene, menstrual care, intimate hygiene, sexual wellness, grooming, and maternity care, a portfolio that tracks almost every hygiene-adjacent need a woman might have from her teenage years through menopause.

The Numbers Tell Their Own Story

Pee Safe’s financial trajectory is the story of a company that has chosen consistent growth over easy profitability, and is now beginning to see those two things converge.

Revenue grew 40% to ₹57.26 crore in FY24, then 46% again to ₹82 crore in FY25. The loss picture improved dramatically: from ₹13.17 crore in FY24 to ₹4 crore in FY25, a 69% reduction. At the unit economics level, the company spent ₹1.05 to earn every rupee of revenue in FY25, down from ₹1.25 the year before. The direction of travel is toward profitability, though the company is not yet at the finishing line.

The funding that has supported this journey tells its own story of growing institutional conviction. Early rounds from Alkemi Growth Capital, Natco Pharma, and Zerodha built the initial capital base, a pharmaceutical company, a fintech platform, and a healthcare-focused growth investor all backing a hygiene brand, reflecting the category’s perceived intersection of health, wellness, and consumer behaviour rather than a straightforward FMCG bet.

Then in January 2026, Pee Safe closed a $32 million Series C round led by OrbiMed, a global healthcare-focused private equity firm, at approximately ₹290 crore. The round was transformative not just in size but in what it signalled: a healthcare-specialist global investor had looked at Pee Safe’s portfolio, its distribution reach, its category leadership in India’s hygiene D2C space, and decided it was worth a serious institutional bet. OrbiMed’s Dr. Sunny Sharma and Sumona Chakraborty joined the board as part of the investment. The round also provided partial exits for early investors who had backed the company through its formative years. Total funding raised across all rounds now stands at approximately $44 to $46 million.

Following the Series C, Pee Safe’s annualised net revenue run rate crossed ₹150 crore, and the company achieved profitability, a milestone that had been approaching through FY25’s loss reduction and arrived definitively in the period following the round.

Distribution has scaled significantly from the early days. Pee Safe is now available across more than 50,000 retail touchpoints spanning over 100 cities in India, covering modern trade, general trade, organised pharmacies, airports, and hospitals, as well as through its own website, Amazon, Nykaa, and other online platforms. Internationally, the brand has a presence in 23 countries, with exports contributing approximately 10% of revenue in recent years.

Talking About What Nobody Wanted To Talk About

The most underappreciated part of Pee Safe’s growth story is not the product or the distribution. It is the marketing. Building a brand in categories that India has historically kept behind closed doors, menstruation, intimate health, sexual wellness, requires a willingness to name things plainly and to treat the consumer as someone capable of handling direct information. That willingness has been one of Pee Safe’s most consistent differentiators.

The brand partnered with the 2017 Bollywood film Toilet: Ek Prem Katha, a film literally about the absence of toilets and its impact on women’s dignity and health, as its exclusive hygiene partner. The alignment was not a stretch. The film’s central argument, that access to clean toilets is a matter of dignity and public health, is the same argument Pee Safe has been making since 2013.

The brand has been vocal about menstrual health, UTI prevention, and intimate hygiene in its content and campaigns at a time when most personal care brands were still treating these topics as too sensitive for mainstream communication. In January 2020, Pee Safe was awarded Best SMB Brand of the Year by Amazon India at a ceremony attended by Jeff Bezos.

Rithish Kumar, who joined Pee Safe in 2017 and was formally recognised as co-founder in 2023 after playing a central role in scaling the brand, was featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in recognition of his work growing Pee Safe into one of India’s most recognisable hygiene D2C brands. The recognition reflected what Kumar himself has described as the mission-first approach that has driven Pee Safe’s category-building work.

“Leading a purpose-driven brand at a young age has been both humbling and deeply enriching,” he has said. “Building a team that believes in the mission and empowering them to take ownership has been fundamental to our growth.”

What The Market Looks Like

Pee Safe operates across multiple categories that each carry their own market dynamics. India’s feminine hygiene penetration remains below 30%, which is both a sobering reality and a measure of the available opportunity. The global personal hygiene market was valued at approximately $612.8 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $877 billion by 2035, growing at a CAGR of around 3.65%, with India’s segment growing considerably faster as awareness, affordability, and retail infrastructure improve.

The organised competition Pee Safe faces comes from multiple directions: large FMCG incumbents like P&G and Kimberly-Clark in menstrual care, specialist wellness brands in intimate hygiene, and a growing field of D2C entrants across grooming and sexual wellness. What Pee Safe has that most of its D2C competitors do not is the breadth of its portfolio and the brand recall it has built across a decade of consistent, category-building marketing. Being the brand that named the problem, not just the product, is a durable advantage in a market where most competitors arrived after the conversation had already started.

Where Pee Safe Is Going

The ambition the founders have articulated publicly is a ₹500 crore revenue target, a number that would represent roughly a sixfold increase from FY25 levels and would require both continued product expansion and a deeper penetration of the offline retail footprint the brand has been building.

The pathway to that number runs through three channels simultaneously: deepening online penetration across its existing categories, expanding the FURR and Domina sub-brands into new retail formats and demographics, and growing the international business beyond its current 23-country presence into markets where the demand dynamics for accessible, quality hygiene products mirror what Pee Safe has built in India.

The brand’s quick commerce presence is also expanding, with products increasingly available on Blinkit and Swiggy Instamart in major cities, a channel that suits the impulsive, need-based purchase behaviour that hygiene products often prompt.

What started as one husband trying to solve a problem his wife had experienced on a road trip has, a decade later, become one of India’s most recognisable hygiene brands, present in 23 countries and more than 50,000 Indian retail outlets, backed by a global healthcare investor, profitable, and still building toward a revenue target that seemed improbable when the first bottle of toilet seat sanitizer was filled and labeled.