Fashion Entrepreneur Fund runs Pitch To Get Rich, a reality-show-meets-venture-studio pipeline for early-stage fashion founders. FEF has now opened registrations for Season 2 with a ₹100 crore investment pool for selected businesses, turning up the size of its fashion startup bet in a category that still struggles to get specialist early capital. Founded by Sanjay Nigam in 2021 and chaired by Vagish Pathak, FEF is trying to do something most Indian founder platforms don’t: focus narrowly on fashion. Then wrap money, mentors, and distribution access around that focus.
That number matters.
Season 2’s ₹100 crore pool is a 150% jump from the ₹40 crore available in Season 1. FEF isn’t pitching this as a one-off TV stunt. It’s framing the show as a serious deal funnel for founders across apparel, footwear, accessories, couture, sustainable fashion, D2C brands, and newer lifestyle labels that can actually scale.
What is Pitch To Get Rich and how does it work?
Pitch To Get Rich is a structured filtering and investment process dressed in entertainment clothing. FEF’s published Season 1 process started with registration and moved into interviews. It required a 5-to-8-minute founder pitch video and ended in a final pitch round judged by FEF board members plus an external panel. For Season 1’s on-screen format, 14 founders were selected to pitch. They faced business challenges and competed for funding and mentorship.
The useful part isn’t the cameras. It’s the paperwork. Applicants were asked for a proper pitch deck with product roadmap and revenue model. They also had to provide margins per order, year-on-year revenue and profit history, average order value, customer counts, repeat-customer data, current valuation, shareholding, and the exact investment ask. By the final stage, founders had to be ready with company registration papers, tax returns, and any trademark or IP certificates. That’s not casual talent-show stuff. It’s basically a diligence funnel.
There’s a wider gate than a lot of founders might expect. FEF’s earlier rules allowed not just operating fashion businesses but also founders with a detailed business plan who were still preparing to launch. That helps explain why the show sits closer to a venture studio than a normal media property. It’s built to pull in both existing brands and founder-in-the-making talent before traditional investors would usually take the first meeting.
That venture-studio angle is the real differentiator. Selected founders don’t just get access to capital; they’re brought into a support structure around mentorship, branding, business building, and industry introductions. In plain English, the pitch is simple: don’t just write a cheque. Help the brand survive after the applause dies down.
Who founded Fashion Entrepreneur Fund and Pitch To Get Rich?
The founding story
FEF was started by Sanjay Nigam, with Vagish Pathak serving as chairman. Nigam launched the fashion venture studio publicly in October 2024 and said the idea came from a pretty obvious gap: fashion founders were getting less structured financial support than founders in hotter startup categories, especially after the Covid years exposed how thin that support really was. FEF’s answer was to combine funding and mentorship under one fashion-first platform.
Why Sanjay Nigam fits this category
Nigam isn’t coming out of a generic startup-investor playbook. His background sits inside fashion, events, brand-building, and media. FEF-linked profiles describe him as someone who has spent about 2 decades in the fashion and marketing business as a model, consultant, strategist, and entrepreneur. He also founded the FEF India Fashion Awards and Team Talent Factory. Earlier work credited to him includes Times Fashion Week, La Finesse, and Moksh Advertising & Events Managements. That mix matters because this isn’t a pure software business. It’s a category where taste, visibility, production, and commercial discipline all collide.
Pathak’s profile is less operator-heavy in public detail, but his role inside FEF is clear. He’s the chairman, and he has been positioned as a builder of support-led initiatives around the fashion and awards ecosystem that FEF sits inside. For a fund trying to combine celebrity, founders, and traditional business leadership, that convening role is useful.
Early traction and what Season 1 proved
FEF’s first big signal was interest. During its first call for registrations, the venture studio attracted more than 25,000 applicants. Later, the TV version of Season 1 was produced with Dharmatic Entertainment and rolled out on JioHotstar, where 14 selected founders pitched for capital and mentorship in front of a mixed panel of celebrities and business leaders. That’s a lot more reach than most niche consumer accelerators ever get.
The ₹100 crore commitment and who is backing it
This isn’t a conventional startup funding round. FEF has opened Season 2 of Pitch To Get Rich with a ₹100 crore investment pool, up from ₹40 crore in the debut season. The platform is backed by Akshay Kumar and Karan Johar alongside Ravi Jaipuria, Naveen Jindal, Gaurav Dalmia, Sonali Dugar, and Manju Yagnik, with Pathak as chairman and Nigam as founder. Akshay Kumar has framed the new commitment as “our investment in the future of Indian fashion.”
Where it sits against competitors
The closest mass-market comparison is Shark Tank India, but that’s also the point: Shark Tank is broad, while Pitch To Get Rich is intentionally narrow. It only needs to understand one category deeply — fashion and adjacent lifestyle businesses. That lets it judge founders on details that generic panels often flatten.
Its other competition comes from founder programs rather than television. India now has consumer and D2C accelerators such as D2CX Runway, D2C NXT, and Rocketfuel, all of which promise mentorship and investor access for brands. But FEF’s bet is different. It combines category-specific capital and show-driven visibility. It also brings a network that stretches from Bollywood to business. That’s unusual. And if it works, it gives fashion founders something they rarely get in one place — funding, attention, and a category-native support system.
Why does Pitch To Get Rich Season 2 matter?
A bigger pool changes the ceiling.
With more capital on the table, FEF can back brands that need more than a symbolic cheque — founders dealing with inventory, sourcing, store rollout, retention, or the brutal cash-cycle problems that fashion businesses run into early. That’s where a lot of promising labels stall. They can get noticed. They can’t always keep operating cleanly enough to scale.
There’s also a credibility signal here. When a platform can bring in names like Akshay Kumar, Karan Johar, Ravi Jaipuria, and Naveen Jindal around a single theme, it stops looking like a vanity project and starts looking like an attempt to build a category gateway. Nigam and Pathak put it neatly when they described FEF as “the platform we wish fashion entrepreneurs always had.” That’s ambitious.
Still, the hard part starts after selection. Fashion is full of brands that look sharp on pitch day and wobble on unit economics six months later. So the real test for Season 2 won’t be how glossy the show looks. It’ll be whether FEF can turn founder visibility into durable businesses. The heavier application process suggests it understands that.
How big is India’s fashion startup market?
Big enough to justify a specialist platform.
FEF’s own leadership has pegged India’s fashion industry at more than ₹10 lakh crore, and broader apparel market research points in the same direction. One industry estimate put India’s apparel market at $88 billion in 2025, with a rise to $117.05 billion by 2034. That’s steady, not explosive, growth. But it’s plenty large for a focused investment engine.
The sharper story is in market structure. A December 2025 broker report estimated India’s apparel market at ₹9.3 trillion in FY25 and projected it would reach ₹14.4 trillion by FY30. It also estimated the branded segment at ₹4.9 trillion in FY25, rising to ₹8.8 trillion by FY30. Online apparel was projected to jump from ₹1.1 trillion to ₹3.9 trillion over the same period. That shift matters because platforms like FEF are chasing founders who want to build branded, D2C-friendly labels — not anonymous supply businesses.
And that’s why the timing makes sense. As organized retail and online fashion take a larger share, category knowledge becomes more valuable, not less. Founders need capital, yes. But they also need help with brand language, channels, margins, and repeat buying. A generalist investor can miss those details. A fashion-native platform is betting it won’t.
What happens next for Pitch To Get Rich?
Pitch To Get Rich now has enough money, enough attention, and enough category focus to matter beyond entertainment. The question isn’t whether Season 2 will attract applications. It almost certainly will. It’s whether FEF can keep proving that a fashion-only founder pipeline can produce brands worth backing long after the cameras switch off.
Watch the founder mix, the cheque sizes, and the post-show survival rate.
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Pitch To Get Rich FAQ
- What is the funding amount for Pitch To Get Rich Season 2? The new pool is ₹100 crore. That’s a 150% increase from the ₹40 crore available in Season 1, which tells you FEF wants Season 2 to be taken as a larger investment platform, not just a follow-up TV season.
- How does Pitch To Get Rich work for founders? It works like a multi-stage selection and investment process. FEF’s published format has included registration and interviews. It also includes a founder pitch video and a final judged round, with applicants expected to share real operating numbers such as revenue, margins, customer counts, and shareholding details.
- Who founded Fashion Entrepreneur Fund? Sanjay Nigam founded FEF and Vagish Pathak serves as chairman. Nigam’s background spans fashion, events, branding, and media ventures, including the India Fashion Awards and earlier fashion-week and event properties, which gives him more category credibility than a typical generalist startup promoter.
- Is Pitch To Get Rich only for fashion brands? Yes — and that’s the whole pitch. Season 2 is open to founders in apparel, footwear, accessories, couture, sustainable fashion, D2C labels, and emerging lifestyle businesses. That makes it far more specialized than a general startup show or a broad consumer accelerator.
