In 2015, a man who sold imported beer out of a small Delhi operation decided India deserved its own craft beer. He called it Bira 91. The monkey mascot showed up on bar taps from Gurgaon to Bandra. Kirin Holdings put money in. So did Peak XV and Sofina.
Last week, that man — Ankur Jain — walked off his own board.
Not fired, exactly. Not resigned, exactly. Settled.
And buried inside B9 Beverages' FY24 annual report is the reason his exit looked less like a negotiation and more like a foregone conclusion.
Start with what's public.
B9 Beverages did ₹638 crore in sales in FY24. It also lost roughly ₹1,000 crore last year. Production is suspended. The beer that once defined "India's first craft beer" has been out of circulation for about a year.
Restarting it needs somewhere near ₹500 crore of fresh money.
So the board, led by Anicut Capital, went shopping. They approached Ravi Jaipuria's Varun Beverages. Burman Family Office. Simba Craft Beer. DS Group. Muthoot Family Office. Sunil Munjal's Hero Corp. Murugappa Group. A founder of a homegrown PE firm too.
What are they selling? Ankur Jain and his family's 17.8% stake.
Which raises the obvious question: how does a board sell shares that belong to the founder?
Here's where the annual report gets interesting.
B9 raised money through non-convertible debentures — several tranches of them. And the security backing those debentures wasn't just company assets. It was Ankur Jain's own shares.
The language repeats across tranche after tranche, almost identically each time. The debt is secured by "a first ranking exclusive pledge over the pledged shares by the pledgor (Mr. Ankur Jain and Mrs. Shashi Jain, KMP of the Company) in favour of the debenture trustee."
The numbers as of March 2024:
Ankur Jain had pledged 13,11,560 equity shares, securing ₹120 crore of debentures and other borrowings. A year earlier that number was 5,22,284 shares. It roughly two-and-a-halfed in twelve months.
His mother, Shashi Jain, had pledged another 8,50,000 shares, securing ₹100 crore.
One tranche spells out that the pledge covers up to 10.30% of shareholding.
First ranking exclusive. That is the strongest form of pledge there is. If the company defaults, the debenture trustee doesn't need to ask anyone's permission. It invokes the pledge and sells.
The shares were only half of it.
Both Ankur and Shashi Jain gave personal guarantees securing ₹140 crore of company borrowings. In FY23, that figure was ₹25 crore. It grew nearly six-fold in a year.
Personal guarantees show up again against multiple working capital facilities. And a subsidiary's NBFC loan was secured by a charge on a director's personal property.
Read that stack together and a picture forms. As B9 burned cash, the founder kept feeding the machine with the only collateral left — himself. His shares, his guarantees, his property.
Every rupee raised that way tightened the noose.
Now go back to the announcement.
The promoter family gives up executive powers. Jain leaves the board. In return, he is absolved of personal liabilities.
That last clause is the whole deal.
Think about what Jain actually held at the negotiating table. His shares were pledged to a trustee that could enforce without him. His personal guarantee exposure ran to ₹140 crore against a company that had stopped making beer. Whether he cooperated or not, the shares were reachable.
What he could get was a release from the guarantees.
So the trade wasn't "give up your stake for money." It was closer to "walk away and we won't come after your house." A founder with ₹140 crore of personal exposure and a company doing zero revenue doesn't have leverage. He has an exit price.
That's also why the two-year dispute with shareholders and lenders ended when it did. Not because someone won an argument. Because the collateral position made the outcome arithmetic.
With Jain out and his stake being marketed, B9 goes into recapitalisation with existing investors. Operations may resume in three to six months.
But the buyers being courted aren't buying a beer company right now. They're buying a brand with recall and a balance sheet with litigations, employee salary arrears and liabilities attached. As one person close to the process put it, any deal will hinge on clearances of several litigations before it can move.
The logic behind the buyer list is visible, though. Varun Beverages just loosened its exclusive PepsiCo arrangement and struck a Carlsberg distribution deal in Africa — it's building alcohol adjacency. Burman Family Office runs Taco Bell and Lite Bite. Murugappa has done exactly this before, buying CG Power out of distress and turning it around. DS Group has the distribution muscle.
Somebody may well make this work.
Ankur Jain built a brand that genuinely landed. Bira 91 had shelf presence, a mascot people recognised, and marquee investors — the hard parts.
What he didn't build was a capital structure that could survive a bad year.
Founders pledge shares because it feels like the cheapest money available. No dilution, no new board seat, no valuation conversation. Just sign here. But a pledge converts your ownership into someone else's option. And a personal guarantee converts a limited liability company back into an unlimited one — for you specifically.
The FY24 numbers show both of those lines climbing steeply in a single year. That's the tell. By the time the dispute reached its endgame, the negotiation wasn't really about the founder's stake at all.
It was about how much of himself he could get back.