For most of the world, a luxury watch means Switzerland. The movement, the finishing, the name on the dial — the entire mythology of fine watchmaking has belonged to a handful of Swiss houses for centuries. A Gurugram startup called Rotoris is out to change that equation, and the market is already answering: its founding chapter of 2,100 numbered timepieces sold out within days of launch in February 2026, and close to 100,000 people have since registered for access to what comes next.
Rotoris, founded in 2025 by Aakash Anand and Prerna Gupta, calls itself an independent watch house imagined in India. Anand previously built and scaled the fragrance brand Bella Vita through to a full exit, while Gupta leads the house, bringing expertise in premium brand-building and customer experience. They are joined by founding partners Anant Narula and Kunal Kapania. Together, the team set out to build what the company describes as India’s first global watch brand — not a homage to Swiss watchmaking, but a house with its own design language, its own rules, and its own following.
Finite by design, not by accident
Every Rotoris watch is released as a named chapter with a published run size — and when the chapter is allocated, it is over. The founding chapter, 2,100 numbered pieces, sold out within days, the company says. The 2025–26 annual production is now fully allocated, and the 2026–27 production is open, with the Manifesta and Astonia collections both live on the company’s website.
The model is deliberate. Buyers join the Rotoris Registry, complete a short profile, and are allocated a piece by invitation. Every timepiece carries an individual number, logged through the Registry, and the mechanism is guaranteed for life, the company says. It is scarcity with the numbers printed on the tin: no silent restocks, no mystery about how many exist.
The demand, the company says, is already global — around 40% of it comes from outside India, across the US, Dubai and Australia. That is a striking figure for a house barely a year old, and it hints at something bigger than a domestic success story: collectors abroad are buying an Indian watch not as a curiosity, but as a timepiece they want to wear.
Assembled by hand in Gurugram
The part of the story that matters most for Indian manufacturing happens at the Rotoris Atelier in Gurugram, where every watch is assembled and tested by hand, the company says. The facility runs on machinery sourced from Switzerland, and its assembly processes were set up under the guidance of Swiss horologists whose careers span Patek Philippe, IWC and Tiffany & Co.
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That combination — Indian assembly, Swiss and Japanese movements depending on the collection, and Swiss-trained process discipline — is the house’s engineering answer to a hard problem. A mechanical watch is one of the most unforgiving objects to manufacture: dozens of tiny components must work together flawlessly for decades, and the finishing must survive a loupe. Building that capability in Gurugram, rather than simply importing finished watches and branding them, is what turns Rotoris from a marketing story into a manufacturing one.
The collections show how far that capability travels. Astonia, launched in September 2026, is a Swiss-movement chronograph in titanium, carbon fibre and steel, limited to 2,175 pieces, with allocated pieces priced at ₹63,000 to ₹1 lakh, the company says. Manifesta, the stone-dial line, gives each watch a dial cut from natural stone — pietersite, mother-of-pearl, black onyx and blue aventurine among them — so no two pieces are ever identical. The new Manifesta release runs on the Japanese Miyota 82S0 movement, with 21 jewels, and every piece carries its own number in the Registry. Alongside them sit Monarch, Arvion and Auriqua, each exploring a different relationship between form, mechanics and the experience of owning a timepiece.
From a sold-out chapter to a global house
The ambition now has serious backing. In October 2026, Rotoris raised ₹70 crore (around $8.5 million) in a Series A round led by Blume Ventures, with participation from 9Unicorns and Centricity, alongside family offices and investors including actor Rannvijay Singha. The capital, the company says, will go into research and development, expanded production, and a growing Rotoris House footprint — the appointment-only spaces where clients experience the collections in person — in India and abroad, including Mumbai and New York.
That follows a $3 million seed round in December 2025 co-led by Zerodha’s Nikhil Kamath, Venture Catalysts and 100Unicorns, with actor Vivek Oberoi and creator Tanmay Bhat among the backers. The company’s “Friends and Partners” community — entrepreneurs, artists, athletes and cultural figures — has become part of the story too, with numbered pieces made for prominent owners.
Rotoris is candid that watches are only the first chapter. The longer ambition, as the company puts it, is a house from India known for its design and the desire it creates. If the founding chapter is any guide, the desire is already there — 2,100 watches, sold out in days, and a waiting list nearly fifty times that size. For Indian manufacturing, the message is just as exciting as the watches: precision, patience and pride of place can be built at home, one numbered timepiece at a time.
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