Why Nykaa Is Betting ₹32 Crore on Aminu’s Science-Backed Skincare | Prachi Bhandari & Aman Mohunta

Aminu built a lab before it built a product

Prachi Bhandari and Aman Mohunta could have picked a formula off a manufacturer’s shelf and been in market inside six months. They spent almost two years in a single room instead. Seven years later, Nykaa bought a majority stake.

Most Indian skincare brands start the same way. You go to a contract manufacturer, choose from formulations that already exist, change the packaging, write the claims, and launch. It is fast, it is cheap, and it works.

Prachi didn’t want to do that. Her objection wasn’t moral so much as practical: she had spent years with clients in her own boutique clinic in Mumbai watching skin behave differently depending on sleep, stress, hormones, season and life stage, and a borrowed formula cannot answer a problem that specific. So when she and Aman started Aminu in 2019, they started with a laboratory.

From design to skin science

Prachi trained as a designer and travelled widely before skin biology took hold of her. What struck her about India was how narrow the conversation was. Walk into a salon and the menu was a facial, a massage, or blackhead removal. Almost nobody was talking about skin as an organ with distinct needs, or about choosing ingredients for a specific concern.

Her clinic became the research base. Treating people over time shows you how skin actually behaves, and more usefully, it shows you where the products on the market run out of answers. Aminu came out of those repeated gaps rather than out of a trend report.

The two met in 2017 and married in 2018. Her question to Aman was blunt: why are you helping other companies grow when we could build something ourselves? She attached one condition. It could not be another me-too brand chasing whatever ingredient was trending that quarter.

Two years in one room

They set up the lab from scratch, starting with a single room and nothing ready-made. For close to two years they worked on research and development before putting a single product into the market, studying skin biology, how individual molecules behave, stability and compatibility, alongside chemists and PhD specialists from pharma and cosmetic science.

The rule they set themselves was that they had to be willing to use every product personally and recommend it to their families. That ruled out shortcuts, inflated claims, and building to whatever the market was buying that month.

Why the products cost what they do

Peptides, copper peptides, vitamin C, amino acids and well-chosen acids are expensive to source and difficult to formulate well. Copper peptide in particular took serious work, including convincing suppliers that a company in India was genuinely developing with it.

Pricing was never the starting point. Build the formula, test it, get it approved, and only then do you find out what it costs. Run it the other way around and the customer gets the number the brand wanted rather than the product the skin needed.

Art, science and mathematics

The name is meant to hold three things together. Formulation is creative work, and Prachi talks about it the way she talks about art. Science validates whether the idea works and is safe. Mathematics makes it precise and repeatable.

She has a useful habit of demystifying ingredients for clients: many of the acids people are nervous about come from sugarcane, citrus, or milk. The point is not that the words sound frightening. It is whether the molecule suits the skin in front of you.

Microplastics were a constraint, not a marketing line

Plenty of creams, gels, cleansers and exfoliants use plastic-based structures or beads, and those particles end up in water systems where they don’t break down. Once the founders understood that, sustainability stopped being a packaging question and became a formulation one.

Replacing those structures with plant-based gums meant more research and more cost. Building it in from the start was still easier than correcting it later.

Skin is an organ, not a surface

Skin protects itself, exfoliates itself, repairs itself and moisturises itself. Good skincare supports those functions rather than fighting them, which is why scrubbing harder does not get you cleaner skin.

With a scrub, the grain size and the exfoliating agent do the work. The user’s pressure shouldn’t have to. If you are rubbing until your face feels raw, the product is asking your skin to compensate for a weak formula.

Skin moods, not skin types

Customers used to ask which facial was best or what would make them look brighter. Now they ask what will actually suit their skin, which is a meaningfully better question. Skin isn’t fixed, so a routine that never changes is the wrong shape.

Aminu uses quizzes and consultations to read lifestyle, sensitivity and what the founders call skin mood, then builds around what the skin needs now. The brand sells through salons and directly online, and the founders are firm that the culture has to survive both. Nobody should be pushing a product just to close a sale.

Bootstrapped, and picky about who writes the cheque

They didn’t build Aminu with a pitch-on-television mentality. The plan was to bootstrap as long as possible and play a long game, and the right investor is someone who understands why the company keeps making slower, more expensive choices.

The same selectivity applies to influencers. The rule is that a person has to genuinely use the product before they talk about it. In a category where customers read ingredient lists and compare claims, forced advocacy is visible, and the honest version is simply slower.

Healthy ageing, not anti-ageing

Prachi is sceptical of anything promising instant fairness or dramatic transformation, glutathione IV drips included. There may be a real benefit to complexion and clarity, but dose, delivery and risk all matter, and it isn’t something to treat casually as a beauty shortcut.

Anti-ageing frames ageing as a defect to beat, which is a fight nobody wins. Healthy ageing is the more honest goal. Their biggest fear isn’t a competitor copying them. It is failing the customer, or running out of patience before the long version of the plan has had time to work.

Since this conversation

In August 2026, Nykaa’s board approved the acquisition of a 51% stake in Aminu for a cash consideration of up to ₹32 crore, with the remaining 49% to follow over the next few years. Prachi and Aman continue to run the business.

The numbers behind the deal line up with everything they say above about the slow route. Aminu stayed bootstrapped to the end, reported revenue of roughly ₹19.4 crore in FY26 against about ₹13 crore the year before, and was profitable. Nykaa cited the brand’s 30-plus proprietary formulations and its presence across roughly 180 salons as reasons for buying in.

Listen to the full conversation with Prachi Bhandari and Aman Mohunta on FyndOutWithRagini.