Inside AstroTalk: Unicorn Status, Revenue & IPO

A Unicorn Built On A Buyback, Not A Funding Round

Most Indian startups earn their unicorn badge the traditional way — a marquee investor writes a big cheque, and the valuation gets stamped on a term sheet. AstroTalk did it differently. The Bengaluru-based astrology platform recently became India's 133rd unicorn without bringing in a single new investor or raising fresh capital. Instead, the billion-dollar-plus valuation emerged from an ESOP buyback, where the company purchased shares back from its own employees at a price that implied a valuation north of $1 billion.

It's an unusual way to cross that milestone, and the timing makes it more interesting still. AstroTalk is gearing up for a public listing, which means it's about to ask stock market investors to accept a valuation that, so far, no external investor has actually had to underwrite. Founder and CEO Puneet Gupta has indicated the company doesn't need to raise a pre-IPO round, and would only consider one if bringing marquee names onto the cap table mattered more than the capital itself. It's a strong position for a founder to be in — but it also means the IPO roadshow will be the first real market test of that internally-set number.

The Numbers Behind The Growth

Whatever questions remain about valuation, AstroTalk's revenue trajectory isn't one of them. The company's operating revenue climbed from ₹283 crore in FY23 to ₹651 crore in FY24, and then to ₹1,176 crore in FY25 — roughly a fourfold increase in just two years. Gupta has guided for FY26 revenue of around ₹1,850 crore, though the company's financials for that year haven't been filed yet.

Profitability tells a more complicated story. Total expenses jumped to ₹1,129 crore in FY25 from ₹542 crore the year before, as the company ramped up spending across technology, operations, marketing and hiring. That pushed profit after tax down to around ₹33 crore in FY25, a sharp fall from ₹85.5 crore in FY24. The company has attributed part of this to one-off employee costs tied to FY25 — likely linked to the ESOP buyback itself — and says that excluding these exceptional items, pre-tax profit actually rose 125% to ₹285 crore from ₹127 crore in FY24. That's a plausible explanation, since buybacks typically do generate one-time employee-related charges, though the company hasn't disclosed the exact size of that exceptional item. That detail, along with several others, will likely only become clear once AstroTalk files its draft IPO papers.

International markets are becoming a meaningful growth lever too. Countries outside India contributed around 20% of operating revenue in FY25, and Gupta says that figure jumped to 37% in FY26, with the US alone making up more than 60% of AstroTalk's international revenue. To support this expansion — and the broader business — the company has also been building out its leadership bench, bringing on a former Google executive as CTO and hiring former GlobalBees leaders as CFO and as chief business officer for its retail arm.

What AstroTalk Actually Sells

At its core, AstroTalk runs a marketplace connecting people with astrologers for one-on-one consultations over chat, audio or video — a business where the company holds no inventory and simply takes a cut of every session. The average order value on a consultation sits around ₹210. Roughly 65% of consultation revenue comes from users asking about marriage, the core user base skews 25 to 35 years old, and about 60% of customers are women. That consultation business alone was profitable enough to generate a pre-tax profit of roughly ₹285 crore on the company's own adjusted numbers — a solid, cash-generating core.

The Real Growth Engine Isn't Consultations Anymore

Here's the twist: the fastest-growing part of AstroTalk today isn't astrology consultations at all — it's ecommerce.

AstroTalk Store launched in November 2024 with a modest initial investment of just ₹30 lakh from the parent company. Once early demand signalled the opportunity was real, AstroTalk poured in another ₹40 crore to build out inventory, strengthen its supply chain, and expand product categories. The results have been striking: the store crossed ₹140 crore in revenue in 2025, is now running at an annualised revenue rate of more than ₹200 crore, and processes close to ₹1 crore in daily gross merchandise value. It has shipped more than 1.6 million orders of rudraksha beads, pyrite, crystal jewellery and similar spiritual products so far.

The company has since spun out a dedicated gemstones vertical offering lab-certified precious and semi-precious stones, paired with astrology consultations and a replacement policy. The store now adds more than 30 new products every month, had crossed 300 SKUs earlier this year, and is targeting 500 SKUs along with ₹400-500 crore in annualised revenue by FY27. AstroTalk is also testing physical retail stores as a third sales channel, alongside its app and the online store.

Why Higher Order Values Don't Automatically Mean Higher Margins

The store's average order value sits around ₹900 — significantly higher than the ₹210 average for a consultation. But a bigger basket size isn't the same thing as a fatter margin, particularly in Indian ecommerce, where discounting and sale cycles routinely eat into unit economics. Every ₹900 store order carries costs a consultation simply doesn't: inventory, warehousing, shipping, breakage, and returns. Certified gemstones add an extra layer — authentication liability — that has no equivalent in the consultation business. AstroTalk hasn't disclosed segment-level margins yet, so exactly how much it keeps from each transaction remains unclear. That's likely to be one of the more closely watched disclosures once the company files its IPO paperwork.

Still, the direction of travel is unmistakable: AstroTalk isn't just bolting on a side business. It's actively reshaping what kind of company it is, right before public market investors get to weigh in on what it's worth.

Betting On A Market That's Hard To Measure

Sizing the opportunity AstroTalk is chasing is genuinely tricky, given how much of India's spiritual commerce and consultation economy runs informally, outside any centralised data. Broader estimates have pegged the overall spiritual economy at somewhere between $60-70 billion — though where you draw the line between a "consultation service" and a "faith commerce transaction" changes that number considerably, and AstroTalk has been steadily pushing that boundary in its own favour.

Competition in the space has also intensified. Rival platform Astroyogi has sued AstroTalk over alleged trademark infringement, while another competitor, InstaAstro, took AstroTalk to the Competition Commission of India alleging abuse of market dominance — a complaint the CCI ultimately dismissed. AstroTalk has come through that regulatory scrutiny intact, but being the platform that rivals keep filing complaints against is exactly the kind of fact pattern that shows up in an IPO prospectus's risk factors section.

Then there's the AI question. Startups like AstroSure are building astrology chatbots directly into the consultation experience, offering a cost-per-conversation that no human astrologer can realistically match. If AstroTalk's long-term differentiation turns out to be mostly about ecommerce rather than its astrologer network, that opens the door for other horizontal ecommerce or quick-commerce players — many of whom are already capitalising on India's steady rhythm of festivals and auspicious occasions — to encroach on its turf.

The Questions An IPO Prospectus Will Have To Answer

AstroTalk still runs two services — matchmaking and pooja bookings — entirely free of charge, for a user base that now exceeds 40 million. Gupta hasn't said if or when that changes. But at some point, especially with an IPO on the horizon, these free offerings will likely need to justify their place in the business or start generating revenue of their own. Public market investors tend to be unforgiving not just about stretched valuations, but about bloated product portfolios carrying underperforming pieces.

As AstroTalk heads toward its listing, a handful of questions remain open: how much of the store business is actually profitable, how the newer product lines are performing, and whether growth in the core consultation business has slowed as AI-powered alternatives enter the market. Gupta's own bet is that the store becomes AstroTalk's next big growth engine, and his ₹400-500 crore ARR target for FY27 will be one of the most closely scrutinised numbers once the company opens its books to public market investors. Many of these answers should come into sharper focus once AstroTalk files its draft red herring prospectus — the document that will finally separate the company's confirmed financial story from the optimism it's currently running on.