Raunak Nirmal and the experiment that became a career

Raunak Nirmal’s education in Amazon had an unusual practical component: becoming one of the people on the other side of its machinery. After Cornell, he joined the company as a business analyst and began selling on the marketplace himself. The experiment grew sufficiently large that he left his employer to pursue it. A job meant to help him understand sellers had produced another seller.

Years later, the New York-based co-founder and CEO of Acquco would buy businesses built by people in that position. There is a pleasing circularity to the route. First learn the platform from inside. Then operate on it. Then buy brands and take responsibility for their next chapter. Somewhere along the way, offer a Tesla to anyone whose qualifying introduction ends in an acquisition. Retail, it turns out, can accommodate both meticulous account reconciliation and a rather conspicuous referral gift.

A family example, then an online company

Nirmal moved from India to the United States with his family when he was seven. He has described watching his parents build their future without accepting money from his grandparents. Their example mattered to him. By fourteen, he had started his first online company. The distance between arrival and entrepreneurship was seven years, much of it ordinarily reserved for homework.

His account of that childhood places effort ahead of inheritance. It is a family story before it is a financing story: parents making their own way, and a son wanting to follow. The first business belongs in that context. There was already an interest in making something of his own long before an acquisition company or a magazine list entered the picture.

He attended Cornell University from 2010 to 2014, studying Operations Research and Engineering. In his own description of his education, computer science also features. His later career would involve both commerce and systems: products to sell, data to interpret, and repeated operating tasks that might be made less cumbersome.

Amazon supplied a setting in which those interests could meet. Nirmal’s initial role was business analyst. In his account, six months later he became a product manager, leading engineers on an idea he had proposed. He described its projected annual revenue impact as approximately $1 billion. That was a projection attached to an internal project, a different kind of number from sales booked by his own business.

The unglamorous work was the education

After leaving Amazon, Nirmal built and sold brands, developed approaches to search visibility, and consulted for sellers. His work also included an outsourcing operation in the Philippines and a reimbursement service. These are unusually useful details in a founder biography because they show the work beneath the job titles.

The reimbursement business, RefundLabs, concerned money a seller could be owed when something went wrong in Amazon’s systems. At a 2019 product launch in Shenzhen, Nirmal explained software intended to identify more than 27 reimbursement scenarios. The service combined account analysis with the collection of evidence and the filing of claims.

It was a business concerned with discrepancies. Inventory could be lost or damaged; charges could need examination. A seller could have a thriving storefront and still need help making the accounts add up. RefundLabs put attention on that quieter part of retail, where the excitement of a sale gives way to the question of whether the right amount arrived.

The launch also included a roundtable with sellers and the company’s leadership. Nirmal was there explaining a tool to the people who might use it. It is a useful scene to hold beside the later fundraising headlines: the future acquirer first spending time on the particular difficulties of operating someone’s account.

By the time Acquco was founded in 2020, his business history already included selling, consulting, software, and operational support. Acquiring brands gave those experiences a new application. The buyer would take ownership of the business and continue the work, rather than stop at identifying an opportunity.

“We are operators at heart.”

Raunak Nirmal, January 2021

Buying the next chapter

Nirmal co-founded Acquco with Wiley Zhang. In the early leadership team, Zhang brought supply-chain and cross-border operating experience, while Jerel Ho handled strategy, acquisitions, and capital raising. Nirmal’s description of the company put brand management and supply chain in the same frame. Buying a collection of businesses would require people capable of running them.

Acquco’s seller process begins with a conversation about priorities and moves through valuation, due diligence, and financial transfer. Its proposition includes a cash payment and the option of profit participation after acquisition. The arrangement makes room for an entrepreneur to sell while retaining a financial interest in what follows.

That structure helps explain the appeal of Nirmal’s move into acquisitions. A business owner may want to start again, reduce daily responsibilities, or realize the value already created. A buyer may want to expand the existing brand. The transaction has to give both parties a reason to welcome the handover.

For the founder who built the product business, a sale is an ending with practical consequences. Someone else will make decisions about stock, listings, and future products. Acquco’s offer therefore includes a claim about the work after closing. Its operating expertise is part of what it asks sellers to buy into.

A financing round, and a car in the driveway

In May 2021, Acquco announced a $160 million Series A financing round. Participants included CoVenture, Singh Capital Partners, Crossbeam, and GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani. The money was intended to support acquisitions and continued development of the company’s technology.

The following month, Acquco launched its Tesla referral program. An introduction that resulted in an acquisition could earn the referrer a car or cash. The company’s published rules required a personal relationship with the seller and targeted private-label businesses with at least $1 million in annual revenue.

It was an acquisition campaign with an unusually easy visual explanation. Introduce a seller; if the deal succeeds, there is a reward substantial enough to require a parking space. The program made the search for businesses visible. The important condition remained the completed acquisition. A contact name alone did not earn keys.

By December 2021, Nirmal had been named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 class of 2022 in Retail & Ecommerce. The products associated with his portfolio were wonderfully ordinary: shower curtains, bug zappers, milk frothers. The ambition had acquired a large financing number, but the merchandise still belonged to everyday life.

Those objects give the story its scale in human terms. A milk frother has to interest someone preparing coffee. A shower curtain has to fit into someone’s bathroom. An acquisition strategy eventually has to return to a product, a customer, and a purchase. The financial vocabulary can travel a long way from the kitchen before finding its way back.

What the growth figures actually measure

In February 2022, Acquco reported more than $420 million in revenue for 2021. Nirmal described the move from $16 million to $420 million over that year. Those figures describe the company during its early expansion; they are historical milestones, rather than a measure of its business today.

A rapidly expanding acquisition portfolio deserves a careful reading. Buying a business brings its sales into the portfolio, while operating improvements concern what happens within the brands. The total revenue figure alone does not tell a reader how much each existing brand improved. Nirmal’s longer-running proposition depends on the everyday work continuing after the portfolio gets bigger.

In June 2022, Acquco introduced dedicated technology and analytics divisions. Their assignments included developing internal tools, finding operational improvements in data, and helping evaluate potential acquisitions. More than twenty employees had been hired across the two groups. At that point, the portfolio contained more than forty brands.

That investment gave a concrete form to the technology part of the strategy. Brand managers were meant to receive better visibility and support across marketplaces. The work extended from evaluating a possible purchase to managing an existing business. An acquisition creates another set of daily decisions; tools have to help with those decisions if they are to earn their place.

The household-brand ambition

Nirmal’s stated ambition has been to turn Amazon-native brands into global businesses selling across multiple channels. The premise is straightforward enough to understand without the word “omnichannel”: a product that finds buyers in one place may find buyers somewhere else. Acquco’s public positioning has included Walmart, eBay, and Shopify alongside Amazon.

Its August 2022 Prime Day announcement supplied examples of the operating work. The company reported more than 107 percent year-over-year sales growth for the event. LuxClub bedsheets and Sigtuna bike locks were among the products highlighted. Brand-management leader Christine Cui described changes to content, branding, social marketing, quality processes, and the product range.

Earlier that year, Acquco also launched its 3PS Awards for third-party sellers, with Nirmal on the judging panel alongside Steve Chou, Mike Masri, and Emmett Kilduff. A seller community sat around the acquisition business: people building products, sharing experience, and sometimes deciding whether to sell.

Nirmal’s route into that community began with trying the work himself. The early experiment became a business; the business became experience he could apply elsewhere. Now the question attached to every acquisition is what the next owner can do with what the first owner built. For all the financing, software, and occasional automotive flourish, the assignment remains pleasingly tangible: keep the products moving, and give people a reason to buy them.