Arjun Vaidya is known for being the founder of Dr. Vaidya’s, one of India’s highest-quality Ayurvedic companies. He’s an entrepreneur and investor who became the first-ever Ayurvedic entrepreneur to be featured in the Forbes 30 under 30 Asia list.
He went to Brown University in the US for a BA degree in International Relations and Affairs and Economics. While in the US, he noticed the significance of Yoga and the influence foreigners had over this Indian traditional discipline.
He didn’t want them to exert the same level of influence on Ayurveda as they did on Yoga, and his patriotic soul urged him to return to India almost immediately. So in 2013, he came straight back to India and landed an internship in India which later secured him a job as an investment professional dealing with e-commerce.
He left this high-paying job after working for 3 years to take on his family legacy of Ayurveda. Around this time, his granddad passed away and he made a promise to himself to never let his legacy die down. This was the start of Dr. Vaidya’s.
Startup Story of Dr. Vaidya’s
Despite having a 150-year-old family history of Ayurvedic doctors and his granddad being one of India’s most successful Ayurvedic doctors, Arjun’s story of how he founded Dr. Vaidya’s has a fundamentally personal touch.
As a child who was born with juvenile bronchitis and diagnosed with asthma, he always had to be cautious when it came to his health, even if it meant having to stay away from the love of his life, cricket.
He grew up with nebulizers, pumps and inhalers instead of the routine Pepsi cola, Sprite, Fanta, and other drinks we all enjoyed during the sunniest summers; and had to resort to golf and squash.
After 14 years of Ayurvedic treatment, he was completely cured of his asthma and could go back to playing cricket. He later became the captain of his school cricket team, which was an excellent achievement for someone who was robbed of his childhood dreams of playing cricket.
“In life, I learned that I don’t get anything easy. There are hard workers and smart workers and I couldn’t be the smart worker, so I had to be the hard worker,” he says.
In 2016 right after he quit his job, he founded and built Dr. Vaidya’s all the way up along with his wife, Trisha Rajani. The company was able to successfully reach more than 2 million consumers all over India.
They managed to launch 80+ quality products and made more than 5,000 sales per day. The company aimed to bring back the rich Indian science of Ayurveda to the limelight and serve modern consumers with the highest quality medicine.
And in 2021, after 5 successful years of building India’s largest D2C [Direct-to-Consumer] Ayurvedic company, he called it quits. It was then acquired by RP Sanjiv Goenka Group in March 2021.
After exiting the company, he went on to be the co-founder of V3 Ventures, a team of founders and investors who invest in early-stage consumer-focused businesses that are purpose-driven and he’s invested in companies like Kuku FM, Cuure, Eka.care, etc.
The man who managed to turn the hardest moments of his childhood into the best thing that’s ever happened to him, we’re truly fascinated by all that he’s been able to achieve to date.
