The Yarn Bazaar, Swayam Fabrics Private Limited

Pratik Gadia is one of Season 1's most industry-native founders — not an outsider disrupting a traditional sector with a technology layer, but a third-generation textile insider who had lived in yarn lanes his entire life, knew every pain point from the inside, and returned from global education with the framework to solve them.Pratik Gadia belongs to a third-generation textile family that has traded yarn for 60 years. Born and brought up in the yarn lanes of Kalbadevi, Mumbai — India's original yarn trading district — his first job was restructuring his father's yarn trading firm at 22. He bootstrapped The Yarn Bazaar for 18 months before his Shark Tank appearance. After graduating from H.R. College, he studied entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon, then returned to India in 2018 and saw how small weavers still negotiated prices on WhatsApp without credit or logistics help. He started coding the MVP in January 2019, roped in childhood friend Dhaval as CTO

The Yarn Bazaar is India's first tech-enabled B2B managed marketplace for yarn — connecting spinners , traders, and weavers (buyers) on a single digital platform with real-time pricing, quality assurance through third-party certification, credit financing, and end-to-end logistics — transforming India's historically opaque, broker-dependent yarn trade into a transparent, tech-mediated ecosystem. The Yarn Bazaar is India's first tech-enabled B2B managed marketplace for yarn — connecting spinners (sellers), traders, and weavers (buyers) on a single digital platform with real-time pricing, quality assurance through third-party certification, credit financing, and end-to-end logistics — transforming India's historically opaque, broker-dependent yarn trade into a transparent, tech-mediated ecosystem. The client sends a message and a bot replies in the chat with possible options of quality, quantity, supplier, and price, according to the demand.

Amount Asked: ₹50 lakhs Equity Offered: 2% Implied Pre-Money Valuation: ₹25 crore

The pitch opened with the market context: India's annual yarn trade worth ₹2.4 lakh crore, 83% of it unorganised, 1,900 spinning mills on one side and 4 lakh small buyers on the other, with brokers controlling the information asymmetry in between. Every small power-loom operator in Surat or Tiruppur overpays for yarn because they have no price transparency and no alternative to their local broker. The solution was demonstrated clearly: a platform where buyers list their requirement, a bot responds with options of quality, quantity, supplier, and price, the buyer selects and orders, and The Yarn Bazaar manages the entire transaction including quality inspection, logistics, credit, and payment assurance. The metric that stopped the room was the zero-default record. The company has done business worth ₹230+ crore on 100% advance payment.

Ashneer Grover connected immediately — BharatPe's core thesis is B2B financial infrastructure for small merchants, and The Yarn Bazaar's credit-for-weavers proposition was conceptually adjacent. Aman Gupta was energised by the GMV scale — ₹10 crore monthly from a bootstrapped startup is extraordinary commercial traction. Anupam Mittal — with Shaadi.com experience in building trust-based marketplaces in traditionally opaque, broker-dominated industries (matrimony had its own "broker" culture) — saw the structural parallel immediately. Peyush Bansal connected the supply-chain transparency mission to Lenskart's own experience in reorganising the fragmented Indian eyewear trade. Namita Thapar was the sole exit — she declared a conflict of interest, as Emcure Pharmaceuticals' supply chains gave her competing institutional relationships in the pharma packaging and textile space.

The negotiation produced one of Season 1's most commercially interesting moments — a founder who received a four-Shark offer for more than double his asking amount, and still tried to negotiate upward. Two sharks, Peyush Bansal and Anupam Mittal, decided to make an offer. At the same time, Ashneer Grover and Aman Gupta also wanted to put up an offer. To prevent any conflict, the four interested sharks, after discussion, came up with a combined offer: ₹1 crore for 10% equity. Pratik Gadia was dissatisfied with this offer and put up his own counteroffer of ₹1.25 crore for 10% equity. After deliberation and persuasion from the investors, Gadia agreed and accepted ₹1 crore for 10% equity

The negotiation produced one of Season 1's most commercially interesting moments — a founder who received a four-Shark offer for more than double his asking amount, and still tried to negotiate upward. Two sharks, Peyush Bansal and Anupam Mittal, decided to make an offer. At the same time, Ashneer Grover and Aman Gupta also wanted to put up an offer. To prevent any conflict, the four interested sharks, after discussion, came up with a combined offer: ₹1 crore for 10% equity. Pratik Gadia was dissatisfied with this offer and put up his own counteroffer of ₹1.25 crore for 10% equity. After deliberation and persuasion from the investors, Gadia agreed and accepted ₹1 crore for 10% equity.