Avni Jain's Nuvah Raises ₹4 Crore to Engineer Heels That Indian Working Women Can Actually Wear All Day

For generations, women have been told that sore feet are simply the price of wearing heels. A young Indian start-up wants to prove that assumption wrong — and it has just raised money from some of India's best-known founders to do it.

Nuvah, a technology-led footwear brand that designs comfort-engineered heels, has raised ₹4 crore in a pre-seed angel round, the company announced on Thursday, September 24. The investors include Amit Jain, co-founder of CarDekho; Shantanu Deshpande, founder of Bombay Shaving Company; and Ishendra Agarwal, founder of jewellery brand GIVA, according to StartupTalky and YourStory.

The round closed within Nuvah's first year of operation. The company was founded in October 2025.

A founder from finance

Nuvah was founded by Avni Jain, an alumna of the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. Before starting the company, she worked in venture capital and at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, according to StartupTalky.

Her experience as an investor shows in how Nuvah is being built. Rather than launching a broad fashion label, Jain has focused on a specific, widely recognised customer problem — painful heels — and on developing proprietary technology to solve it.

"Women have long been conditioned to accept discomfort as the cost of wearing heels. Nuvah was founded to challenge this belief," the company said.

The SteadyForm technology

At the centre of Nuvah's product is SteadyForm, a proprietary footbed designed to respond dynamically to shifting pressure across the foot.

When a woman walks in heels, her body weight shifts towards the ball of the foot and the toes, concentrating pressure in a small area. Conventional heels typically use a fixed footbed that does little to redistribute that pressure, which is why discomfort often builds over the course of a day.

According to the company, SteadyForm went through 24 design prototypes and more than 900 hours of wear testing before launch. That level of development is unusual for an early-stage fashion brand, and it signals Nuvah's intention to compete on engineering and comfort rather than design alone.

Nuvah's heels start at ₹4,000 a pair, positioning the brand in the premium segment of India's women's footwear market.

Where the money will go

Nuvah plans to use the new capital for research and development, advancing its comfort technology and testing different go-to-market strategies.

The company sells directly to consumers across India and plans to launch a festive collection around Navratri. Over the next three to five years, it aims to become India's leading lifestyle footwear brand for working women.

An underserved market

Nuvah is targeting a large and growing market that has been underserved in several ways.

India's per-capita footwear consumption is about 1.9 pairs a year, compared with a global average of about three pairs and more than six pairs in developed markets, according to an October 2024 report by IIFL Securities cited by StartupTalky. The same report forecast that branded women's footwear in India would grow at about 15% a year over the next decade.

Several trends support that outlook. More women are entering the workforce, particularly in India's cities, and they are spending more on work-appropriate clothing and footwear. Online shopping has made it easier for new brands to reach customers across the country without building large store networks. And consumers are increasingly willing to pay a premium for products that deliver measurable benefits, such as comfort, durability or health.

Yet much of the women's footwear market still relies on imported designs that are not built for Indian feet, Indian climates or Indian working conditions, which often involve long commutes, extended hours on one's feet and a mix of formal and informal settings. A brand that designs specifically for these conditions could find a loyal customer base.

Backed by consumer founders

The choice of investors is telling. Amit Jain has built CarDekho into one of India's largest automotive platforms. Shantanu Deshpande has grown Bombay Shaving Company into a well-known personal care brand. Ishendra Agarwal built GIVA into a fast-growing jewellery brand with a large retail footprint.

All three have experience building consumer brands in India, and their involvement gives Nuvah access to advice on product development, marketing, distribution and fundraising — expertise that can be as valuable as the capital itself at the pre-seed stage.

A women-led business for women customers

Nuvah is also part of a broader wave of women-founded consumer brands in India that are designed around women's needs rather than adapted from products built for others.

In categories such as beauty, apparel, personal care and health, female founders have shown that deep understanding of their customers can translate into strong products and loyal communities. Footwear, where women's comfort has often been treated as secondary to style, is a natural area for that approach.

The road ahead

Nuvah faces the challenges common to early-stage consumer brands. It will need to build awareness in a crowded market, prove that its technology delivers comfort consistently across sizes and styles, and manage manufacturing quality as it scales.

Footwear is also a category where returns and exchanges can be costly, particularly for online-first brands. Nuvah will need to get sizing and fit right to keep return rates under control.

Distribution choices will matter too. Many Indian footwear brands that began online have found that customers want to try shoes on before buying, especially at higher price points, and have gradually added stores, shop-in-shops or partnerships with multi-brand retailers. Nuvah's plan to test different go-to-market strategies suggests it is still weighing which mix of online and offline channels will work best for a product whose main promise — comfort — is most convincing when experienced in person.

Pricing will be another test. At ₹4,000 and above, Nuvah is asking customers to pay a premium, and it will need to show clearly that its heels are different from conventional options.

Why it matters

Nuvah's early funding shows that investors see value in consumer brands built around genuine product innovation, even in categories as familiar as footwear. It also highlights a growing interest in solving everyday problems that women face but that the market has long ignored.

For Avni Jain, the next step is to prove that SteadyForm can turn a common frustration into a loyal customer base. If it succeeds, Nuvah could help change what Indian women expect from a pair of heels — and show that comfort and style need not be a trade-off.