India's 2025 M&A revival had a shadow. For every incumbent paying up for a prized brand, there was a founder selling under duress, a lender enforcing a claim, or a tribunal deciding who owned what was left. The same consolidation wave that rewarded strong buyers exposed the debris of the 2021 boom: over-leveraged roll-ups, mega-acquisitions that never integrated, and cash-burning models that ran out of road.
Logistics: a rescue dressed as a takeover
The clearest distressed deal of the year was Delhivery's purchase of rival Ecom Express. Announced in April 2025 and completed in July after Competition Commission clearance, Delhivery paid up to Rs 1,407 crore (about $169.5 million) for a stake exceeding 99%. The price told the story: Ecom Express had last raised private capital at a valuation near Rs 7,300 crore, meaning the sale marked a roughly 78% collapse in value. The company had lost Amazon as a major client and watched Meesho, once more than half its shipment volume, shift to its in-house Valmo network. A firm that had eyed a public listing instead became a distressed acquisition that handed the market leader scale it could not have bought at par.
D2C: the roll-up unwinds one brand at a time
No collapse better captured the unwinding of the house-of-brands thesis than Good Glamm Group. Once valued at about $1.26 billion, the content-to-commerce roll-up dismantled its unified model in July 2025 as lenders enforced claims and pushed for brands to be sold individually. The markdowns were brutal: media property ScoopWhoop was offloaded for around Rs 18-20 crore, while MissMalini entered sale talks at roughly Rs 4 crore, a fraction of the Rs 70-80 crore it was acquired for in 2021. Women's wellness brand Sirona was bought back by its own founders in a distress deal. Debt owed to venture-debt lenders including Stride Ventures, Trifecta and Alteria Capital, layered on heavy cash burn, turned a serial acquirer into a serial seller.
Edtech: the billion-dollar acquisition still in court
The most consequential distressed situation traces back to India's most aggressive acquirer. In 2021, Byju's parent Think & Learn bought offline test-prep chain Aakash Educational Services for close to $1 billion. By 2024 the buyer had become the casualty: Think & Learn was admitted to insolvency by the NCLT's Bengaluru bench on 16 July 2024. Its residual stake of roughly 25.75% in Aakash is now the prize in a drawn-out ownership battle. Aakash pressed ahead with a Rs 240 crore rights issue, structured in two tranches, that would dilute Byju's, and India's Supreme Court declined to block it. A landmark acquisition meant to anchor a hybrid education empire has instead become an asset being prised away in insolvency court.
Quick commerce: a write-off, not a sale
Some distressed situations never even reached a deal table. Quick-commerce pioneer Dunzo, which raised more than $450 million across its life, ceased operations on 6 January 2025 after its last co-founder departed for Flipkart's delivery unit. Reliance Retail, which had invested $200 million for a 25.8% stake in early 2022 as Dunzo's largest shareholder, formally wrote off the entire holding, about Rs 1,645 crore, in its FY25 annual report. Where a buyer might once have paid for the technology or team, the market's verdict was zero.
The lesson beneath the numbers
Distressed M&A is not a footnote to India's consolidation story, it is half of it. The through-lines are consistent:
- Roll-ups amplify, not absorb, risk. Debt used to buy growth becomes a forcing function to sell when revenue stalls.
- Client concentration kills. Ecom Express and others learned that a single anchor customer walking away can erase most of a valuation.
- Strong balance sheets buy the weak. Delhivery's ability to consolidate a rival cheaply was the mirror image of Ecom's inability to stand alone.
For 2026, the deal count will keep climbing, but as much because distress creates sellers as because ambition creates buyers.