Akriti Gupta is an Indian entrepreneur, brand builder, and baby and parenting industry expert who is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Loopie, India's first premium stroller and baby gear brand. Founded in 2025 and headquartered in Gurugram, Haryana, Loopie is a design-first, safety-forward homegrown brand that offers premium strollers, diaper bags, multi-stage car seats, and curated accessories for the new generation of Indian parents. It is the product of over a decade of professional experience in the baby and children's product category, combined with the deeply personal perspective of a mother who saw first-hand the gaps in the Indian baby gear market and resolved to fill them with a brand built on the principles of safety, thoughtful design, comfort, and genuine relevance to Indian families.

A computer science engineer by undergraduate training and a management professional with a postgraduate diploma from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, one of the world's most selective and prestigious business schools, Akriti Gupta combines rare breadth of qualification with a decade of hands-on industry experience across product sourcing, category management, supply chain operations, retail expansion, and business strategy in the baby and kidswear sector. Before founding Loopie, she worked in senior roles at Udaan, the B2B commerce platform, Juno Mom, a mother and baby care brand, Jollee, a children's products company, and Wealth Advisors India, building an understanding of the full demand and supply side of the Indian baby market that few founders in this space can match.

In 2025, Loopie raised a seed funding round of Rs. 7.2 crore led by Sauce VC, Hyperscale Ventures, and the Patni Family Office, establishing credible institutional backing behind the brand's growth ambitions. Akriti Gupta gained national visibility when she appeared on Shark Tank India Season 5, the fifth edition of India's premier entrepreneurial reality television programme on Sony LIV and Sony Entertainment Television, where she pitched Loopie's vision to a panel of India's most respected and successful investors. Her confident presentation of the brand's market opportunity, her deep category knowledge, and her strategic clarity in prioritising long-term brand alignment over short-term capital made a strong impression on the Sharks and on the national audience watching the programme. She represents a new generation of Indian women entrepreneurs building ambitious, globally competitive consumer brands in underserved categories, and stands among the most promising founders to emerge from India's rapidly expanding D2C startup ecosystem.

EARLY LIFE

Akriti Gupta's early life details are not extensively documented in the public record, as is characteristic of startup founders whose prominence has been built through the quality of their work, their company-building capabilities, and the force of their professional vision rather than through family background or pre-entrepreneurial public profile. What is clearly apparent from her educational and career trajectory is that she grew up with both the intellectual aptitude to gain admission to the B.Tech programme at the Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology, one of India's leading private engineering universities, and the ambition and management potential to subsequently gain admission to the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, one of the world's most selective and respected business schools.

The path from computer science engineering to consumer brand entrepreneurship in the baby products category reflects a personal journey shaped by both professional experience and lived experience as a parent. Akriti Gupta has described in her own words how the founding of Loopie emerged simultaneously from her decade of professional immersion in the baby and children's product industry and from her personal experience as a new mother navigating the Indian baby gear market. When I became a parent, she told Adgully in August 2025, I realised that most baby gear in India either lacked thoughtful design, was made from subpar materials, or came as expensive imports that didn't address the real needs of Indian parents and children. Her work in the industry only reinforced this observation. The convergence of professional insight and personal experience created the founding conviction behind Loopie: a belief that India's parents deserved a homegrown brand that could blend safety, comfort, and aesthetics while truly understanding the needs of modern Indian families.

Her journey before founding Loopie was defined by a sustained immersion in the practical realities of building and scaling consumer businesses in India's baby and children's product market, working across functions including product sourcing, category management, supply chain operations, retail expansion, and strategic planning at multiple organisations before creating her own. This decade of preparation gave her the market knowledge, the operational understanding, the investor relationships, and the personal conviction that enabled her to found Loopie and build it quickly into a brand with institutional backing, national media visibility through Shark Tank India Season 5, and a product portfolio that is genuinely competing with established global players in India's premium baby gear segment.

EDUCATION

Akriti Gupta completed her Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science from the Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology, commonly known as KIIT, in Bhubaneswar, Odisha. KIIT is one of India's premier private universities, established in 1992 and accorded the status of a deemed university in 2004. It is recognised as one of the best private engineering universities in India and has a strong placement record across the technology and business sectors. Akriti's undergraduate training in computer science provided her with a rigorous analytical foundation, a familiarity with technology and data-driven thinking, and a structured problem-solving orientation that would prove directly applicable to the challenges of building and scaling a consumer brand in the digital age.

After completing her B.Tech, she pursued a Post Graduate Diploma in Management from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, one of the world's most selective and prestigious management schools. Founded in 1961 in collaboration with Harvard Business School and the Government of India, IIM Ahmedabad consistently ranks among the top business schools in Asia and regularly features in global rankings. Admission to its PGDM programme requires exceptional performance in the Common Admission Test and a rigorous selection process involving written ability tests and personal interviews, and the programme is regarded as among the most intellectually demanding and personally transformative experiences available to any management professional in India. The PGDM programme at IIM Ahmedabad, completed between 2013 and 2015, gave Akriti Gupta a comprehensive grounding in marketing strategy, consumer behaviour, financial management, operations, and entrepreneurship, alongside the peer network, the institutional confidence, and the strategic thinking frameworks that IIM Ahmedabad graduates routinely bring to leadership roles across India's most demanding organisations.

The combination of a technology undergraduate degree and an IIM Ahmedabad management postgraduate qualification gave Akriti Gupta an educational profile that is particularly well-suited to the demands of founding and scaling a consumer technology and direct-to-consumer brand in the modern Indian market. The analytical rigor of her computer science training, combined with the marketing, strategy, and general management disciplines of her IIM Ahmedabad education, provided the foundation for the product development, supply chain management, brand building, digital marketing, and fundraising capabilities that have defined Loopie's early success.

FAMILY

Akriti Gupta maintains a private personal and family life consistent with the professional conventions of startup founders in India's consumer technology ecosystem. Details of her family background, parents, and immediate family are not part of the publicly available record. What is known is that she is a mother herself, and that her personal experience of parenting and of navigating the Indian baby gear market as a new parent was a direct and formative influence on the founding of Loopie.

She has described the experience of becoming a parent as the catalyst that converted a decade of professional observation of the baby products market into the personal conviction that a new kind of brand was needed. The intersection of professional expertise and lived parenting experience gives Loopie its distinctive character: it is a brand built by someone who has understood the Indian baby gear market from the perspective of both an industry professional and a customer, and who has channelled both forms of knowledge into a product and brand philosophy that resonates with the new generation of Indian parents it serves. This dual perspective, both analytical and deeply personal, is one of the most distinctive and compelling elements of Akriti Gupta's story as a founder.

CAREER

Early Career: Wealth Advisors India

Akriti Gupta began her professional career at Wealth Advisors India Private Limited, a financial services firm, where she gained her initial corporate experience in a domain quite different from the consumer products sector in which she would eventually build her reputation. This early exposure to financial services gave her a foundational understanding of investment analysis, financial planning, and the relationship between business strategy and financial performance, skills that would later prove directly relevant to her fundraising work for Loopie and to her management of the company's financial structure and capital allocation.

Jollee: Children's Products

She subsequently joined Jollee, a children's products company, where she began building the industry-specific knowledge of the baby and children's product category that would define the middle and later years of her pre-Loopie career. At Jollee, she developed expertise in the product development, sourcing, and retail distribution challenges specific to the children's product segment in India, gaining a first-hand understanding of the competitive dynamics, consumer preferences, and supply chain complexities of a category that she would later return to as a founder.

Juno Mom: Mother and Baby Care Brand

One of the most significant roles in Akriti Gupta's pre-Loopie career was her work at Juno Mom, a mother and baby care brand focused on the needs of new parents. Her experience at Juno Mom gave her deep immersion in the specific demands of the mother and baby product category, including the safety standards and regulatory requirements that apply to products used by and for infants, the emotional and practical considerations that shape new parents' purchasing decisions, and the brand-building challenges of creating trust and credibility in a category where the stakes for parents are extremely high. This experience was directly formative for the founding philosophy of Loopie, which places safety, trust, and genuine relevance to Indian parenting realities at the centre of its brand identity.

Udaan.com: B2B Commerce and Scale

Akriti Gupta also worked at Udaan.com, one of India's most significant and well-funded B2B commerce platforms, where she gained experience in the high-growth, technology-driven dimension of Indian commerce. Udaan, founded in 2016 by former Flipkart executives, connects manufacturers, brands, traders, and retailers across India's most important consumer categories, including fashion, apparel, electronics, general merchandise, and groceries. Her experience at Udaan gave her an understanding of the supply chain, logistics, and distribution architecture of Indian commerce at scale, as well as the technology-enabled operational models that are reshaping how goods flow through India's commercial ecosystem. This understanding of both the supply side and the technology infrastructure of Indian retail has been directly applicable to the building of Loopie's distribution and operations model.

Founding Loopie: India's First Premium Stroller and Baby Gear Brand (2025)

In 2025, Akriti Gupta founded Loopie, described as India's first premium stroller and baby gear brand, with a clear and compelling founding thesis: that India's parents deserved access to a homegrown brand that could compete with global players on safety, design, and quality while being genuinely designed for the needs and preferences of Indian families. The brand was launched with the Loopie Hop stroller as its hero product, accompanied by a curated range of premium stroller accessories including rain covers and mosquito nets, after which the product portfolio was expanded to include a thoughtfully designed diaper bag and a multi-stage car seat. The founding of Loopie represented the culmination of over a decade of industry experience, the personal motivation of a new parent who had lived the gaps in the Indian baby gear market, and the management education and strategic thinking of an IIM Ahmedabad PGDM holder who understood exactly how to build and position a premium consumer brand in a competitive and rapidly growing market.

The brand's positioning is built on four interlocking pillars: safety, which Akriti places as the non-negotiable foundation of every product decision; thoughtful design, which means ensuring that every product is conceived and tested for the specific contexts and constraints of Indian parenting, from the crowded pavements of Indian cities to the diverse climates and cultural preferences of Indian families across regions; comfort, for both the child and the parent; and aesthetics, reflecting a conviction that Indian parents increasingly expect their baby gear to be beautiful as well as functional. Loopie's products are safety-certified and are designed to integrate seamlessly into parents' daily lives, reflecting a deep understanding of how new parents actually move through the world and what they need their baby gear to do.

Seed Funding: Sauce VC, Hyperscale Ventures, and Patni Family Office

In 2025, Loopie raised a seed funding round of Rs. 7.2 crore from a set of investors that reflected the strength of Akriti Gupta's professional standing and the quality of her vision for the brand. Sauce VC, a prominent early-stage venture capital firm in India's D2C and consumer brand ecosystem, led the round. Hyperscale Ventures, a growth-focused investment firm, participated alongside the Patni Family Office, the investment vehicle of one of India's prominent industrial families. The total funding raised across two rounds as of March 2026 was USD 798,000, according to Tracxn data. This institutional backing enabled Loopie to expand its product lines, build its team from the founding core to nineteen employees by August 2025, and develop its distribution channels across both online and offline retail. As of December 2025, the founder's net worth as calculated from Loopie's cap table was approximately Rs. 28.4 crore, with founders holding 50.76 percent of the company.

Shark Tank India Season 5: National Recognition

Akriti Gupta gained national visibility and recognition when she appeared on Shark Tank India Season 5, the fifth edition of India's premier entrepreneurial reality television programme, which aired on Sony LIV and Sony Entertainment Television from 5 January 2026 to 17 March 2026. Loopie appeared in Episode 2 of the season. The Sharks in Season 5 included some of India's most celebrated entrepreneurs and investors: Aman Gupta of boAt, Anupam Mittal of Shaadi.com, Namita Thapar of Emcure Pharmaceuticals, Vineeta Singh of SUGAR Cosmetics, Ritesh Agarwal of OYO, Kunal Bahl of Snapdeal, Viraj Bahl of Veeba, Amit Jain of CarDekho, Mohit Yadav of The Minimalist, Kanika Tekriwal of JetSetGo, Shaily Mehrotra of FixDerma, Varun Alagh of Honasa Consumer, and Hardik Kothiya.

On the show, Akriti Gupta presented Loopie's vision, market opportunity, and growth strategy with the confidence and depth of knowledge that comes from over a decade of direct industry experience and a thorough IIM Ahmedabad-trained strategic understanding of the brand's competitive positioning. Her presentation was noted for its clarity of business fundamentals, strong category understanding, confident negotiation skills, and long-term brand vision. Observers highlighted in particular that she demonstrated a willingness to prioritise strategic alignment with the right investor over the quick capture of capital, a quality that reflects both the strength of her conviction in Loopie's long-term potential and the maturity of her approach to building a brand of lasting significance rather than a company optimised for short-term metrics.

Vision: Building a Global Indian Baby Brand

Akriti Gupta's vision for Loopie extends well beyond the immediate Indian market. She has articulated a clear ambition to build a global Indian brand that represents quality, safety, and trust in the baby care segment, competing with and eventually surpassing the established international brands that have historically dominated the premium end of the Indian baby gear market. This global ambition is grounded in a disciplined domestic strategy: by building a brand that deeply understands Indian parenting needs and earns the trust of Indian parents through consistent quality and safety performance, Loopie is building the foundation of credibility and brand equity from which global expansion becomes possible. Her roadmap for Loopie includes launching innovative new products, expanding distribution across major Indian cities, strengthening both online and offline presence, and in due course exploring global expansion opportunities that would bring a Made in India premium baby brand to the world stage.

PERSONAL PHILOSOPHY AND LEADERSHIP STYLE

Akriti Gupta's leadership philosophy is deeply customer-centric and rooted in the conviction that great brands are built by deeply understanding the people they serve. She has described parenting as an experience that should be joyful and stress-free, and has made this conviction the organising principle of Loopie's product development approach: every product decision starts with the question of what will make parents' lives easier, safer, and more enjoyable, and works backward from that question to the product specifications, materials, design choices, and safety certifications that will deliver that experience.

Her approach to brand building is design-first, meaning that she places aesthetic quality and visual distinctiveness alongside safety and functionality as co-equal priorities rather than optional add-ons. This design-first orientation reflects both her personal conviction that Indian parents deserve beautiful products and her market insight that design quality is an increasingly important decision criterion for the growing segment of Indian consumers who are willing to pay a premium for baby gear that they feel proud to use and display. Her leadership style has been described as combining deep product obsession with strong team-building capability and the fundraising acumen to attract credible institutional investors to an early-stage company in a category that had not previously attracted significant premium brand-building investment.

She has described Loopie as not just a business venture but a brand shaped by lived experience, reflecting a founder's conviction that the most powerful consumer brands are built by people who have personally experienced the problem they are solving. As a mother who navigated the Indian baby gear market herself and found it wanting, she brings to Loopie a combination of analytical rigour and emotional authenticity that gives the brand's communications, product choices, and market positioning a quality of genuine empathy that is difficult to replicate from the outside.

INTERESTING FACTS

• Akriti Gupta founded Loopie in 2025, positioning it as India's first premium stroller and baby gear brand, filling a gap she identified both through over a decade of professional experience in the baby and children's product category and through her own personal experience as a new parent navigating the Indian baby gear market.

• She holds a Post Graduate Diploma in Management from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A), one of the world's most selective and prestigious business schools, and a B.Tech in Computer Science from KIIT, giving her one of the most academically distinguished profiles among India's consumer startup founders in the parenting category.

• In 2025, Loopie raised Rs. 7.2 crore in seed funding from Sauce VC, Hyperscale Ventures, and the Patni Family Office, with total funding across two rounds reaching USD 798,000 by March 2026, establishing credible institutional backing behind her vision to build a globally competitive Indian baby brand.

• She appeared on Shark Tank India Season 5, which aired on Sony LIV and Sony Entertainment Television from January to March 2026, presenting Loopie in Episode 2 to a panel of India's most celebrated entrepreneurs and investors, gaining national recognition for her confident pitch, deep category knowledge, and strategic approach to investor selection.

• Loopie grew its team by ninety percent year on year, from ten employees in August 2024 to nineteen employees in August 2025, reflecting rapid organisational scaling in the months following the company's founding and initial funding.

• She built her industry knowledge across four organisations before founding Loopie: Wealth Advisors India, Jollee, Juno Mom, and Udaan.com, accumulating over a decade of experience across financial services, children's products, mother and baby care, and B2B commerce before channelling it into her own brand.

• Loopie's product philosophy is built on four interlocking pillars: safety certifications as a non-negotiable foundation; thoughtful design calibrated for Indian parenting contexts; comfort for both child and parent; and aesthetics, reflecting the conviction that Indian parents deserve baby gear that is beautiful as well as functional.

• Akriti Gupta has described the founding of Loopie as emerging simultaneously from her professional insight that the Indian baby gear market was underserved at the premium end and from her personal experience as a mother who could not find the kind of thoughtfully designed, safe, and genuinely India-relevant baby gear that she wanted for her own child, a convergence of professional and personal motivation that gives the brand its distinctive quality of lived authenticity.