With a 95%+ client retention rate that defies industry norms, Mumbai-based Sqroot is emerging as one of India's fastest-growing performance marketing agencies — and a serious growth partner for D2C founders who want results, not just reports
In an industry where the average agency-client relationship dissolves within three months- victim to broken promises, vanity metrics and the relentless churn of account managers, one Mumbai-based firm is making a quietly radical claim that keeping clients is a more powerful growth strategy than acquiring them.
Sqroot, founded in 2019 by college friends Vishal Arolkar and Shivangi Parekh, has crossed a milestone that few performance marketing agencies in India can claim: a 95%+ client retention rate, measured over a 12-month rolling period. In the same window, the agency has doubled its active client base from 35 to 75, cementing its place as one of the fastest-growing performance marketing agencies in the country.
For founders, CXOs, and investors watching the D2C marketing services space, these numbers deserve a second look.
The Retention Problem That Nobody Talks About
Performance marketing is a sector built on short attention spans. Brands hop from agency to agency chasing quarterly ROAS spikes. Agencies over-promise on pitch decks and under-deliver on dashboards. The result is an industry-wide retention crisis that most players have quietly accepted as the cost of doing business.
Sqroot's founding team saw this dysfunction as an opportunity, not an inevitability.
"Retention isn't a metric we track, it's a philosophy we build every service around. If a client is leaving within three months, that's a product problem, not a sales problem." - Vishal Arolkar, Co-Founder, Sqroot
The agency's retention figure north of 95%, is not just a point of pride. It is a structural competitive moat. In a business where client acquisition cost (CAC) is high and pitching cycles are long, keeping clients for 12, 24 and 36 months dramatically improves unit economics. Revenue becomes predictable. Teams become specialists, not generalists scrambling to onboard new accounts. And most critically, long-term relationships allow Sqroot to generate the kind of compounding performance improvements that short engagements never can.
The Growth Inflection: 35 to 75 in One Year
Twelve months ago, Sqroot was managing campaigns for 35 active clients. Today, a 114% increase in active mandates, achieved without a single rupee of venture funding, without a large sales team and without compromising on the selectivity with which the agency onboards brands.
The growth has been driven by three converging forces: a referral engine powered by retained clients, an expanding footprint in Shark Tank India-featured D2C brands, and a deepening capability stack that now includes AI-enabled campaign optimization, landing page performance, and full-funnel checkout engineering.
What Sqroot Actually Does and Why It Works?
Sqroot's offering is rooted in a single, non-negotiable principle: net ROAS and real profitability over impressions and click-through rates. The agency positions itself as a growth partner, not a vendor — a distinction that is easier to claim than to operationalize.
What makes Sqroot's execution different is its integration into the full customer journey. Rather than running ads in isolation, the agency optimizes every touchpoint a potential customer encounters from the first Meta or Google impression, through the landing page experience, to the checkout flow, prepaid order ratios, and Return-to-Origin (RTO) rates. In practical terms, this means Sqroot works across Google & Meta campaigns; scales ad spend while maintaining or improving ROAS; engineers high-converting checkout flows; and improves lifetime value (LTV) metrics that most agencies never touch.
The agency has worked with over 350 brands across skincare, wellness, jewellery, health, food, and fashion with more than 90% of its clientele in the D2C segment. Its portfolio includes The Face Shop, Belif (the Korean beauty brand owned by LG), and multiple Shark Tank India-featured brands.
Case Studies: Where the Numbers Come From?
Retention rates and revenue figures are meaningful. But the story behind them is in the individual brand transformations.
In one case, Sqroot was brought in by a D2C brand in the bike accessories segment. The previous agency had struggled to break past a ROAS of 3x. Sqroot restructured the campaign architecture, aligned creative strategy with purchase intent, and scaled the brand to a 14x ROAS, one of the highest in the segment.
In another engagement, a skincare brand came to Sqroot after cycling through multiple agencies with no sustainable results. Rather than immediately deploying ad spend, Sqroot spent the first phase of the engagement auditing creatives and analyzing conversion data. The team identified that the brand's hero products being pushed in ads were not actually the products driving purchase intent. After repositioning, fresh creative production, and iterative A/B testing, the brand achieved a 6x ROAS.
The Thought Leadership Moment
The Indian D2C market is at an inflection point. As per industry estimates, the segment is expected to grow to $60 billion by 2027, with performance marketing spend tracking this growth closely. Yet, a significant portion of D2C marketing budgets continue to be misallocated - spent on agencies that optimize for the wrong metrics, in the wrong funnel stages, with the wrong creative strategy.
Sqroot's founders believe the industry needs a reckoning — and they intend to lead it. Vishal Arolkar and Shivangi Parekh have been increasingly vocal about the gap between what agencies promise and what brands actually need: not more impressions, but better margins. Not more clicks, but more profitable customers.
This philosophy — disciplined, data-first, profitability-led — is increasingly resonant with a new generation of D2C founders and CFOs who have been burned by agencies that delivered dashboards instead of growth.
What Comes Next
Sqroot’s next chapter is being written at the intersection of AI-enabled campaign management and deep performance expertise across Meta and Google — the two platforms that continue to drive the most scalable and measurable growth for D2C brands. In an ecosystem where website sales depend on precision targeting, creative iteration and real-time optimisation, the agency has focused on building predictable enquiry and revenue engines through paid acquisition.
Operating with a 25-member team from its office at Phoenix Market City, Mumbai, Sqroot is building toward a future where performance marketing is less about media buying and more about designing intelligent growth architecture. This includes structured funnels, creative testing frameworks, accurate conversion tracking, landing-page optimisation and AI-driven bidding strategies that compound performance over time.
Rather than spreading attention across multiple channels, the agency is doubling down on what it understands best - scaling D2C website sales through deep expertise in Meta and Google Ads. The focus remains on generating qualified enquiries, purchases and repeat demand directly on brand-owned websites.
For founders seeking a long-term growth partner and for investors tracking sustainable D2C growth models — Sqroot’s trajectory highlights a disciplined, platform-led approach to performance marketing.
About Sqroot: Sqroot (sqroot.in) is a Mumbai-based AI-enabled performance marketing agency specialising in D2C e-commerce growth across Google & Meta. Founded in 2019 by Vishal Arolkar and Shivangi Parekh.
