On Building India's First Clean Perfume ft. Akash Valia l The Unpuzzle Project Roundtable

Akash Valia spent fifteen years learning how other people’s businesses grow — L&T, Würth, then PharmEasy, where he ran Docon and moved across marketing, strategy and business development. Then he quit to sell perfume. Secret Alchemist began as a thirty-five-year-old family aromatherapy practice built by Ankita Thadani and her mother Sumi. Akash advised it on the side for three years while holding a full-time job, then jumped in properly in late 2024 with Samantha Ruth Prabhu joining as the third co-founder. In June 2025 they launched perfume and watched it go from zero to the majority of revenue inside a single month. A $3M round led by Unilever Ventures followed, along with a Business of Beauty Global Award — the first for an Indian perfume brand. This isn’t a brand story. We get into what it costs to industrialise someone else’s craft, what you have to kill when a pivot works too fast, what changes in a founder’s head the morning after institutional money lands, and the one that mattered most to us: India supplies the world’s perfumery with raw material and still hasn’t built a global fragrance brand. Why not. The Unpuzzle Project Roundtable is the recorded version of what we already do, curated closed rooms for founders, investors and operators. No stage, no panel, no deck on a projector. Built by Prince Fernandes, Rohit Keshri and VJ.