Phab, India’s nutritionist-founded protein snack brand, closes a $4M Pre-Series A round led by OTP Ventures and Chona Family Office, to fund brand building, geographic expansion, and strengthen the team, accelerating Phab’s mission to make high-protein, calorie-efficient snacking the everyday default for Indian consumers.
Bridging the Nutrition Gap: A Problem Hiding in Plain Sight – India has a nutrition problem that doesn’t look like one. Walk into any supermarket, kirana store, or open a quick commerce app and you’ll find snacks in every shape and flavour, most loaded with refined carbs and empty calories, marketed under the language of health. “High protein.” “Low fat.” “Clean eating.” The claims are everywhere. The nutrition, often, is not.
Good nutrition should not come at the cost of calories or taste. Phab was founded to solve exactly this: not by creating another supplement for the fitness-obsessed few, but by building India’s first macro-first nutrition brand – calorie-efficient formats that slot into real Indian snacking habits, without asking consumers to choose between taste and their weight, overall health management goals.
Phab was founded by Gayatri Chona, a practicing nutritionist whose more than a decade of clinical counselling shaped every product decision the brand has made. The founding insight did
not come from a boardroom, it came from thousands of client consultations and the recurring pattern Gayatri observed: people wanted to eat better but kept failing not because of a lack of willpower, but because no solution actually worked for their lives.
“People don’t fail diets. Diets fail people. The gap was never motivation, it was the absence of calorie-efficient solutions that balance taste and macros. Every snack in the market was either high calorie or low on taste. Nobody was solving for the glaring gap at the intersection.” – Gayatri Chona, Founder, Phab
Phab’s product philosophy rests on a belief most healthy snack brands quietly ignore: your body processes molecules. What matters is the macro balance – high nutrition, very low on unnecessary calories. So you feel strong while also feeling light.
In a landscape where most D2C health brands are almost entirely online, Phab has built a 50% offline footprint across modern trade and general trade, a reach and distribution structure that pure-play digital brands cannot match. On quick commerce, the brand has a growing dark store presence across Tier 2 and 3 cities, with market share steadily increasing across platforms.
The $4M Pre-Series A will be deployed across three priorities: Brand building, Geographic expansion and team building.
“This round is not about proving the concept that’s done. It’s about deploying capital where we know it works: brand, reach, and team. The goal is to make Phab the default choice when an Indian consumer reaches for a snack and wants something that is actually good for them & their health goals.” – Suhail Sameer, Founder & Managing Partner, OTP Ventures
