The shoe that cost 300 crore to refuse: Virat Kohli’s gamble on making rather than selling

Virat Kohli turned down the deal that most athletes would have taken without reading the fine print.

Puma wanted to extend their partnership. The offer on the table was around ₹300 crore across eight years, roughly $35 million guaranteed, with his face on their existing products and a new number in his bank account every quarter. Safe, clean, done.

He said no.

What he did instead is now the subject of a business case that people in Indian sports are still trying to fully understand. In 2023, Kohli put ₹40 crore of his own money into a company called Agilitas Sports, took a minority equity stake, and moved the One8 brand he’d co-built with Puma over six years into a setup he actually co-owns.

On June 21 this year, One8’s first independent product line launched at a concert venue in Delhi, with a Punjabi pop star performing and fans who’d travelled from Goa and Jammu to pick up shoes they’d pre-ordered through a food app.
It was, to put it plainly, a strange way to sell cricket shoes. It also sold out.

What Agilitas actually is

The man who made Kohli say yes to this arrangement is Abhishek Ganguly, who used to run Puma’s India and Southeast Asia business.

He knows Kohli well enough to recall specific details from their first meeting in 2016, which happened the same day Kohli had scored a double century and then gone straight from the stadium to the gym in full heat. That kind of discipline stuck with Ganguly. 10 years later, the two of them are co-founders.

Ganguly set up Agilitas in 2023 with co-founders Atul Bajaj and Amit Prabhu. The model was vertical integration from day one, not just a brand house but a company that could design, manufacture, and sell its own products without depending on the contract manufacturers that every other D2C brand in India leans on. To do that, they went and bought one of those manufacturers.

Mochiko Shoes, India’s largest sports footwear contract manufacturer, had been making shoes for Adidas, Puma, New Balance, Skechers, Reebok, Asics, and Decathlon for years. Agilitas acquired it in 2023. That single move changed what Agilitas actually was.

It stopped being a brand incubator and became an industrial platform with factories in Noida, Uttarakhand, Dehradun, and Rishikesh. Mochiko’s revenue was ₹642 crore in FY23. By the end of FY26, Agilitas is projecting ₹1,350 crore from that same operation, more than double in three years.

This matters for One8 specifically because of what’s happened to Indian import policy. The government’s quality control orders now impose significant tariffs on imported footwear that doesn’t meet domestic manufacturing compliance.

Brands that import their products from China or Vietnam are paying a premium that Agilitas, making shoes in Uttarakhand, doesn’t have to. Every pair of One8 spikes made in Noida is structurally cheaper to bring to market than an equivalent import. That advantage doesn’t show up in any product ad, but it’s probably the most durable part of the business model.

Who’s put money in and what it says

Agilitas has raised serious institutional capital. Convergent Finance put in ₹400 crore in the early rounds. Nexus Venture Partners came in with ₹100 crore and then returned in June 2026 with another ₹200 crore.

Rainmatter, the venture fund backed by Zerodha’s Nithin Kamath, added ₹25 crore in the same round. The post-money valuation now sits around ₹2,058 crore, roughly $242 million for a company that’s three years old.

Kohli’s position in this is specific and documented. RoC filings show the board allotted him 361,611 Class 2 Compulsorily Convertible Preference Shares at ₹1,106 each, totalling just under ₹40 crore. That puts his direct equity at 1.94%.
It’s not a controlling stake and it was never meant to be. The point is that his upside is now tied to how the company grows, not to how many billboards he appears on.

Other cricketers have noticed. Yuvraj Singh holds 0.51%. Young opener Abhishek Sharma put in ₹3 crore in the latest round alongside SMLINE Ventures. Fifty-eight Agilitas employees bought in during an internal round in 2025. The cap table reads less like a sponsorship arrangement and more like a startup’s early days, with athletes sitting at the same table as fund managers.

The comparison that gets made most often, including by people inside Agilitas, is Roger Federer‘s involvement with On Running. Federer didn’t just endorse On; he invested early, brought genuine product input, and watched the company go from Swiss upstart to NYSE listing.

On’s valuation when it went public made Federer’s equity worth considerably more than any endorsement deal he’d ever signed. That’s the template Kohli is trying to follow, adapted for a market where the sport is cricket and the manufacturing base is already here.

The shoe he rejected seventeen times

When Kohli started working on cricket spikes with the Agilitas engineering team, he rejected 17 design prototypes. That number gets cited often enough now that it’s become part of the brand’s founding story, though what it actually reflects is the specific physical demands of batting at the elite level.

The shoe needs to handle hard plant-and-pivot stops, aggressive turf grip for quick singles, and heel impact over a five-day Test match on hard-packed clay. Those aren’t requirements you can meet with a modified training shoe. The team had to design a chassis from scratch.

The result is two spike configurations, the Cover Drive 18 Pro and Cover Drive 18 X, both priced at ₹13,999. The Pro is built for longer formats, Test matches and 50-over cricket, where stability over many hours matters more than explosive output. The X targets T20 movements: short bursts, rapid changes of direction, the kind of footwork that happens in the outfield during 6 overs of power play.

Both run on One8’s proprietary cricket stack, with a grip system called Sonic Grip designed specifically for turf, a midfoot stabilization chassis called PWR+LCK, and cushioning branded as Sonic Foam.

There’s also a lifestyle shoe called the Seam XVIII Signature, priced at ₹9,230. That number isn’t arbitrary. It matches Kohli’s Test career run tally of 9,230 across 123 matches before he retired from the format in May 2025.

At the Delhi launch, comedian Danish Sait, in character as Mr. Nags, asked Kohli on stage whether he’d consider un-retiring from Tests just to add a few more runs and improve the shoe’s price point and margins. Kohli laughed and said he’d rather undersell the shoe. “I am done with the longest format of the game.”

The fourth shoe, the Boom Rush at ₹9,999, is a hybrid trainer for gym and conditioning use.

Selling through a concert

What Agilitas didn’t do was list One8 on Flipkart and call it a launch.

On June 6, pre-bookings opened exclusively through District, the lifestyle and events platform run by Zomato. Buying a pair of shoes generated a QR code that functioned as an event ticket.

People who bought online then travelled to the Yashobhoomi Convention Centre in Dwarka on June 21 to physically collect their orders at what One8 called its Global Premiere, a concert by Karan Aujla, a fashion runway styled by Masaba Gupta, and the actual product for the first time in people’s hands.

Customers came from Chennai, Lucknow, Jammu, Goa, and Panipat. The logistics of this are worth pausing on: people travelled hours for a shoe pickup. What turned it into something worth traveling for was the event wrapped around it, but also Kohli on stage sharing something personal.

He talked about Aujla’s track Winning Speech, which he said is part of his pre-match routine. The reason it resonates, he explained, is that both he and Aujla lost their fathers early and had to build their careers largely alone. He uses the song to focus before he walks out to bat.

That kind of story doesn’t come out of a press release. It’s the thing that made One8’s launch feel different from the dozens of athlete brand launches that come and go each year without leaving much impression.

The retail strategy beyond the launch event is more conventional, starting with a D2C web store and app, then exclusive brand outlets in key cities. Agilitas also runs Sportsyard, a multi-brand large-format retail chain that stocks Nike, Adidas, Puma, and others.

The flagship in Bengaluru is 34,000 square feet with sports courts and a cafe inside. It turned profitable within two months of opening. Ten more outlets are planned this financial year.

The family dimension

Anushka Sharma, Kohli’s wife, took a minority equity stake in Agilitas in May 2026 and is co-developing a yoga and wellness line under the One8 name.

Smriti Mandhana has been signed to co-create women’s performance products.

Sania Mirza is brand partner and women’s sport advisor for Lotto, which Agilitas licenses separately.

The women’s play matters more commercially than it might look. The Indian activewear market for women has been growing faster than menswear for several consecutive years, and the segment is mostly served by international brands at price points that domestic manufacturers struggle to compete with.

If Agilitas can use the same Mochiko manufacturing base to produce technically credible women’s products at local price points, the women’s line could end up bigger than the cricket spikes that got all the attention.

What Kohli actually gave up

It’s worth being clear about the trade Kohli made, because it gets obscured by the startup language around it.

He walked away from ₹300 crore, guaranteed, from a company that had already paid him reliably for years. What he got in return is a 1.94% stake in a business valued at ₹2,058 crore, which today is worth roughly ₹40 crore, exactly what he put in. His upside only materialises if Agilitas grows significantly from here, or exits at a higher valuation.

That’s a real risk that most athletes in his position would sensibly avoid. The endorsement model exists precisely because it transfers almost all commercial risk to the brand and leaves the athlete holding cash.

What Kohli seems to have calculated is that the endorsement model’s ceiling is also much lower. Guaranteed money is safe until the contract ends or the brand decides someone younger and cheaper is available.

Equity in a company you helped build keeps compounding as long as the company does. Whether that logic plays out for One8 depends on whether Agilitas can compete with Nike and Adidas on a shelf in Melbourne or Johannesburg, which is where the company says it wants to be selling by the end of FY27.

That’s the test none of the launch events can settle.

That is the bet. That is the no that cost ₹300 crore to say. Whether it pays off depends on whether India believes that its own factories, its own designers, its own athletes, can compete with the world.

Kohli thinks they can. He has spent his whole life proving people wrong. This is just the next innings.