How Peyush Bansal turned a clear gap into Lenskart—and an IPO

In 2007, Peyush Bansal left a stable job at Microsoft in the US and returned to India with no clear business plan. What he did have was a conviction that large, unorganised consumer categories could be transformed with technology and direct-to-consumer models.

The first experiment was SearchMyCampus, an online platform to help college students find housing, coaching and jobs. But it was in 2010, after co-founding Valyoo Technologies with Sumeet Kapahi and Amit Chaudhary, that Bansal zeroed in on a category hiding in plain sight: eyewear.