Meet the entrepreneur whose vision of helping Indians see better made him a billionaire

Peyush Bansal, co-founder of eyewear retailer Lenskart Solutions, is the latest Indian to join the three-comma club. Shares of SoftBank-backed Lenskart, which went public nine months ago, hit an all-time high of nearly Rs 627 on the National Stock Exchange last week. Bansal’s nearly 9% stake in the $11 billion market capitalization company plus proceeds from the shares he sold in the IPO give him an estimated net worth of $1 billion.

The shares rose after the company reported that its net profit quadrupled to 2.28 billion rupees ($24 million) for the quarter ended June 30, amid rising sales in both domestic and overseas markets. Based in the northern Indian city of Faridabad, Lenskart sells everything from glasses to sunglasses and eyewear accessories, both online and through a network of stores.

It has a presence in 16 countries, including Singapore, Japan and the United Arab Emirates, as well as India, where it has 2,725 stores in 157 cities. It added 132 stores in the last quarter, of which 116 were in India and 16 were abroad, taking the company’s total store count to 3,459 stores.

Bansal, 42, started the business in 2010 with his sister Neha, who heads marketing, and two other co-founders, Amit Chaudhari, the head of sourcing, and Sumeet Kapahi, who oversees the store network. The company initially started as an online retailer that offered customers a 3D feature to try on glasses virtually. It later expanded offline and opened its first store in New Delhi in 2013.

“Buying glasses is not an easy decision,” says Arvind Singhal, president of Gurgaon-based retail consultancy The Knowledge Company. “You want the opinion of a family member or a friend and you want to see a wide range. It’s good that Lenskart has corrected course and opened physical stores.”

Bansal took the company public in November 2025, raising $821 million in an initial public offering that was 28 times oversubscribed. However, the stock is trading at a 3% discount to its issue price.

SoftBank first invested in Lenskart in December 2019, leading a $275 million funding round that turned Lenskart into a unicorn. The Japanese investor sold a small stake during the IPO, but offloaded a larger 3.25% stake for $300 million in June, after the mandatory six-month lock-up period ended. He remains the largest shareholder with a stake close to 10%. Other notable investors include Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, private equity giant KKR and TPG.

Bansal, who has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from McGill University in Canada, began his career at Microsoft in Redmond, where he worked as a program manager for its MS Office product. He quit after a year to return to India in 2007 and founded Valyoo Technologies a year later. He operated a website called searchmycampus.com intended to help students find on-campus housing.

Reading an article about how India was an underserved market in the vision care and eyewear sector gave him a new direction: organized eyewear retail was a huge opportunity as the market was dominated by dozens of small opticians across the country. He worked in one such store in Delhi to better understand the business before taking the plunge.

An October 2025 report from Mumbai-based investment firm ICICI Direct pegs the size of the Indian eyewear market at $9.2 billion in fiscal 2025 and projects it to expand to $17.2 billion in fiscal 2030. Prescription glasses account for 75% of sales; sunglasses contribute $2 billion or just over a fifth and contact lenses the rest. Sunglasses sales are expected to nearly double to $4 billion by fiscal 2030, while the contact lenses segment is expected to expand to $730 million from $480 million during the same period.

Lenskart’s main rival is Titan Eye+, the eyewear division of Titan Company, part of the Tata conglomerate, but its revenue of Rs 9,160 crore for fiscal 2026 and its number of stores of less than 1,000 are far behind Lenskart. Other traditional retailers such as Kolkata-based Himalaya Opticals and Delhi-based Bonton Opticians compete in the luxury and premium niche.

Analysts say that there is enough room for all players in the glasses market. ICICI Direct estimates that in 2020, 43% of the country’s population had eye problems and that by 2030, almost two-thirds of Indians will need glasses.

Anticipating this trend, Bansal has been increasing Lenskart’s physical presence. The number of stores exceeded 1,000 in 2022 and 2,000 in 2025. Overseas expansion began with the opening of a store in Singapore in 2019, which has since grown to 65 stores. Lenskart entered the UAE with a store in Dubai in 2022 and Saudi Arabia in 2023.

In June 2022, Bansal looked to a further horizon by acquiring a majority stake in Japanese eyewear brand Ownday for $400 million. Ownday now has 669 stores from the 460 it had when Lenskart acquired it.

For the year ended March 31, Lenskart’s net profits rose 148% to 5.3 billion rupees on revenue that rose almost a third to 90 billion rupees. Analysts say the company is reaping the benefits of scale and backward integration. It makes lenses in a factory in the state of Rajasthan and has a joint venture to make frames in a Chinese factory in Zhengzhou. The company is building a new factory on a 50-acre site in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, with the capacity to produce 50 million pairs a year.

“Lenskart’s business model is one of its kind,” says Singhal. “Not even Titan has been able to do what the company has done in terms of scale of manufacturing and range they offer.”

That said, challenges remain. “Lenskart’s ability to sustain its growth and profitability will depend on its resilience on four critical fronts: securing stable and profitable raw material supplies, maintaining uninterrupted manufacturing operations, attracting and retaining qualified eye care talent and navigating intensifying global competition in the eyewear industry,” says Amarjeet Maurya, assistant vice president, fundamental research, Mumbai-based Kotak Securities.

Bansal, who declined to comment when contacted, outlined his vision for Lenskart in the company’s latest quarterly presentation. “We set out to sell glasses,” he said. “It was always a dream: to change the way a billion people see and experience the world… Few companies manage to try. It’s still Day Zero.”