India's Evolving Sexual Wellness Space
Exploring how India's evolving sexual wellness space is reshaping consumer attitudes, driving innovation, and opening new avenues for growth.
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This week on Eximius Echo, we explore how India's evolving sexual wellness space is reshaping consumer attitudes, driving innovation, and opening new avenues for growth.
If you’ve not heard of us, Eximius is a pre-seed stage VC fund focusing on fintech, AI/SaaS, frontier tech, and consumer tech. You can find out more here. This newsletter is an attempt to share ideas, insights, and context within the realms of our chosen sectors. Let’s dive in.
From abject poverty to the fifth largest economy in the world, India’s story has been one of resilient growth at a nigh-unprecedented pace. Therefore, the India of 2025 finds a rapidly evolving society with impressive ambitions and greater access to resources. While this expedient development has brought about heightened social awareness across widespread issues, we still have ways to go for addressing critical problem statements that have either been overlooked or muzzled as taboos. One such key problem statement that affects Indians across strata is sexual health.
Even though the discourse on sexual health has become more accepted in recent years, scrutiny on the subject still lacks gravitas. Just in North India, 81% of men and 82% of women consider themselves afflicted with at least one sexual disorder. As the number of sexually active individuals increases (87% of Indians explore intimacy before marriage), the quotient of those grappling with sexual disorders and/or dissatisfaction is bound to increase as well. Thus, it becomes extremely important to create multifaceted products that enable people to optimize their sexual health, steer clear of any ailments, seek treatments wherever necessary, and find satisfaction in their sexual lives.
While the space did receive funding of over $26 million between since 2020, it is still a very nascent space. To uncover the nature of solutions needed, let’s cover the existing landscape in detail:
The Lay of the Land
Propelled by rising customer consciousness and enhanced access, the Indian sexual health market is expected to nearly double by 2032 with a CAGR of 5.8%. This pace of growth can be attributed to the sheer diversity of problem statements and solutions that exist in this space. The industry, as a whole, is comprised of contraceptives, sexual hygiene products, products for sexual pleasure, and solutions aimed at alleviating disorders and boosting performance.
While sexual wellness medication and hygiene based products have received notable investor interest in the past, one of the categories that is growing at a rapid pace is the sexual pleasure industry. A key reasons is the onset of quick commerce platforms which has greatly expanded the industry’s penetration as people don’t need to visit crowded mom-and-pop stores anymore where one might encounter societal stigma.
This effect is also indicated below:
The above chart denotes how the sexual wellness market fared on Blinkit in November with condoms driving the most revenue and volume. Quick commerce not just ensures anonymity and instant delivery, but also diversity in SKUs which encourages young adults to use it. This has also enabled new-age brands to reach directly to their clientele, democratising the industry.
Sub-Category Deep Dive
Condoms are a particularly notable segment with a market worth $210 million and growing at a CAGR of 7.4% between 2024-2030. Notably, condoms as a product have always been underpenetrated in India. As few as 10% of sexually active men in India use condoms for contraception with rural areas being particularly worse-off. Taking Durex, the market leader, as an example, only 10-15% of their sales in India come from rural areas which proved to be a highly price sensitive market. Interestingly, condom-usage amongst women is on an uptick. While 9.5% of married women cited using condoms during sex, such use amongst unmarried women is at 27%. Thus, it is important for any condom brand to invest heavily in market creation, particularly amongst men in rural areas.
Lubricants pushed the second most volume, largely because they are mostly used in conjunction with condoms. In India, 30% of women experience pain or discomfort while being intimate with their partners. Therefore, there is ample opportunity for brands to expand this market and capture a large share. Interestingly, water-based lubricants tend to be quite popular, largely due to their hypoallergenic properties, longevity, and their ability to work well with any kind of condoms. Their specialised water-based lubricant offerings are the biggest factor for Bold Care’s success as the second biggest player in the segment.
Adult toys, on the other hand, have seen substantial growth more recently, with the sale of said items rising by over 65% in India since the first lockdown. As their popularity has grown, 45% of Indians have confessed to using sex toys with 78% openly discussing about them with their friends. Whilst they are also used by couples, the primary audience for these products tends to be women. While only 30% of women end up orgasming during sex, 69% report better orgasms using sex toys. This is a major factor behind the demand for massagers as the biggest product category in this subsegment. Interestingly, products catering to men have also been populating the market. This is a buoyant indicator for changing perceptions and a broadening subsegment within sexual wellness.
India is informally billed as the impotence capital of the world. 35% of men in India before the age of 40 face sexual problems at some stage. These problems range from premature ejaculation to erectile disfunction. Interestingly, 25% of ED patients in India are under the age of 30. Therefore, to avoid any potential issues during intercourse, men tend to look for supplements or other enhancers to boost their performance. In this market, natural products like Shilajit and Ashwagandha are the highest-selling products.
In addition to the above, there exists a service-based market as well comprised primarily of sexologists and other physicians. While visiting a sexologist or any other medical practitioner specialising in the field was deemed a source of societal ignominy, the sexual health consultations market had grown by 200% during 2017-22. Spurred by Covid, online consultations in particular comprised a massive 70% of market share which indicates a shift in perceptions. Thus, people are gradually becoming more open to visiting specialists and resolving their sexual woes once and for all.
What is the way forward?
As indicated above, the Indian sexual wellness market, while still being one of paradoxes, has grown considerably across multiple subsegments. Greater societal awareness in urban regions, coupled with enhanced distribution through quick commerce has opened up the market across a multitude of product categories. However, in spite of this, there are still problem statements that hinder the sector across sub-segments.
Given that Indians tend to ask over 1,000 queries pertaining to sexual health per hour, information asymmetry is the foremost of these. This coupled with high sexual disorder rates creates a vicious cycle where lack of sufficient know-how leads to critically adverse outcomes for young Indians across the country. Therefore, there is a need for a specialised full-stack platform for addressing sexual health queries and providing end-to-end aid wherever needed through a multi-pronged approach. Platforms need to be built that not just provide hassle-free consultations but also provide inclusive care to guide patients through the entire treatment without churning. To ensure sufficient penetration in rural regions and raise patient confidence, these will need to be driven with an omnichannel approach, which will demand considerable operations from founders.
Lack of awareness and availability of female contraceptives is another key issue. Unfortunately, 45% of women still tend to use permanent methods like IUDs, sterilization, etc. for contraception which can have long-standing side effects. Therefore, it is important to raise awareness of short-term solutions amongst women to help them access solutions which might be more appropriate for them.
Conclusion
In spite of incumbents like Durex and Manforce being present across multiple product categories, nearly 60% of sexual wellness product searches on e-commerce platforms are generic. This indicates that the Indian market is yet to be completely satisfied by any brand’s products and bodes well for the audience’s propensity to welcome new entrants. As a result, there is still a massive whitespace for new-age brands to design bespoke solutions across product categories geared towards the Indian audience from India.
If you are looking to build for any of these problem statements or any other space within sexual wellness, please reach out to us at pitches@eximiusvc.com.