Sachin Bansal walked away from Flipkart in 2018 with more money than most Indian founders will ever see, and put close to Rs 4,000 crore of it (as per Inc42, citing Navi’s 2022 draft prospectus) into a financial services company built, from day one, to become a bank. The Reserve Bank of India said no.
Navi Technologies, the company that resulted, now sells personal loans, home loans, mutual funds, general and health insurance, and a UPI payments app to tens of millions of Indians. In August 2026 it took its first large outside institutional cheque in almost eight years of existence — $100 million from Prosus at a $1.3 billion valuation (as per TechCrunch, August 2026) — even as its FY25 results, filed only months earlier, showed the group swing from a Rs 358.5 crore profit to a Rs 126 crore loss (as per Entrackr, reporting Navi Technologies’ FY25 financials). This is the story of a Flipkart fortune, a rejected banking licence, and a company now on its third attempt at an IPO.
Quick facts
| Company | Navi Technologies Limited (Navi Group) |
| Founded | December 2018, Bengaluru, as BACQ Acquisitions Private Limited, later renamed Navi Technologies |
| Founder(s) | Sachin Bansal (chairman, co-founder of Flipkart) and Ankit Agarwal (co-founder) |
| Businesses | Personal and home loans (Navi Finserv), UPI payments, mutual funds (Navi Mutual Fund), general and health insurance (Navi General Insurance) |
| Latest FY revenue | Rs 2,565 crore, revenue from operations, consolidated, FY25 (year ended March 2025) |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Loss of Rs 126 crore, consolidated, FY25 (versus a profit of Rs 358.5 crore in FY24) |
| Listed | Private. Filed a DRHP in March 2022 that was shelved; a fresh IPO is reportedly being planned for around December 2026 |
| Market value / last valuation | $1.3 billion at its August 2026 Prosus funding round; the company is separately reported to be targeting up to $2 billion for its planned IPO |
| Key shareholders | Sachin Bansal (about 97.8% as of the 2022 DRHP), Ankit Agarwal (about 1%), Gaja Capital, and now Prosus |
What they do
Navi is a Bengaluru-based financial services group built around a single mobile app. Through that app and its group companies, it sells unsecured personal loans and home loans (via its non-banking finance company, Navi Finserv), processes UPI payments, distributes and manufactures mutual funds through Navi Mutual Fund, and sells general and health insurance through Navi General Insurance. Its customers are largely first-time or thin-file borrowers in small towns and cities who want an instant, paperless loan or a low-cost index fund, rather than the salaried, urban, credit-card-holding customers that older private banks chase.
The origin
Sachin Bansal co-founded Flipkart in 2007 and ran it for over a decade before Walmart bought the e-commerce company in a 2018 deal valuing it at $16 billion. Six months after that deal closed, in December 2018, Bansal teamed up with Ankit Agarwal, his batchmate from IIT Delhi who had gone on to work as a vice-president at Deutsche Bank and later at Bank of America, to set up a company called BACQ Acquisitions Private Limited. It was renamed Navi Technologies soon after. Bansal put in around Rs 888.5 crore of his own Flipkart proceeds as the founding capital (as per Business Standard, November 2019). The founding insight was straightforward and typically Bansal in its scale: build the financial-services equivalent of Flipkart from scratch — lending, payments, insurance, and asset management, bundled under one app — and eventually turn that platform into a full-service bank, using the RBI’s on-tap universal banking licence window that opened in 2016.
The struggle years
Navi’s early growth was fast: it acquired DHFL General Insurance in January 2020, renaming it Navi General Insurance, and picked up the distressed Essel Mutual Fund in the following year, renaming it Navi Mutual Fund. But the underlying bank ambition ran into repeated trouble.
In May 2022, the RBI rejected the application filed by Chaitanya India Fin Credit — Navi’s microfinance subsidiary and the vehicle through which it had applied for a universal banking licence — along with five other applicants including UAE Exchange and Financial Services and REPCO Bank. The regulator gave no public reasons (as per Inc42 and YourStory, both May 2022; also reported by TechCrunch). Three months later, in September 2022, Navi Technologies did get SEBI’s approval for the Rs 3,350 crore IPO it had filed papers for that March — but weak secondary-market conditions meant the issue was never launched (as per YourStory, September 2022, and Inc42). Then, in November 2023, Navi sold Chaitanya itself to Ananya Birla’s Svatantra Microfin, reportedly for Rs 1,479 crore under the original agreement (Business Standard, August 2023), though other reports on the completed transaction cite a lower Rs 1,166 crore figure (Inc42/Entrackr coverage of FY24 results) — the bank ambition had been fully abandoned. The regulatory friction didn’t end there: in October 2024 the RBI ordered Navi Finserv, along with three other non-bank lenders, to stop sanctioning and disbursing new loans, citing concerns over pricing policy and usurious interest rates on small-ticket loans (Business Standard, October 2024). The ban was lifted in December 2024 after remediation, only for a second, similar restriction to be imposed on Navi Finserv in April 2025 — this one lifted on 2 December 2025 (Inc42).
The turning point
If one event defines Navi’s arc, it is the RBI’s May 2022 rejection of Chaitanya’s universal banking licence application. Before that decision, Navi’s entire structure — the insurance arm, the mutual fund, the personal-loan book — had been assembled, in large part, to support a banking application backed by an owner willing to put in thousands of crores of his own money. After the rejection, the story changed fast: the IPO that was meant to fund a listed, bank-track fintech was quietly shelved within months; Chaitanya, the actual licence applicant, was sold off entirely by November 2023; and Navi’s lending arm went on to attract two separate RBI enforcement actions on loan pricing within the following two years. The company that had set out to become a bank ended up, instead, being repeatedly reminded by its regulator to behave like a disciplined NBFC.
The money behind it
Navi’s funding shape is unusual for an Indian fintech of its size: it was overwhelmingly self-funded by its founder rather than venture-backed. Bansal put in the initial Rs 888.5 crore in 2019 and, per Inc42’s read of the 2022 DRHP, had invested a cumulative Rs 3,895–4,000 crore into the company by the time it filed to go public — leaving him with roughly 97.8% of the shares and Agarwal with about 1%. The first meaningful outside institutional money came in April 2020, when private equity firm Gaja Capital invested Rs 204 crore for 1.45 crore shares at Rs 140.5 apiece (Entrackr and Business Standard, April 2020), a stake Gaja has held through the company’s subsequent ups and downs.
The bigger recent development is Prosus. In August 2026, the Dutch-listed technology investor put in $100 million, described by TechCrunch as Navi’s “first outside capital” in institutional terms — a characterisation that sits oddly against the 2020 Gaja Capital round, so both are worth naming: whichever way it is framed, Prosus is unambiguously the largest and most prominent external institutional backer Navi has taken on. The round valued Navi at $1.3 billion, down from the roughly $2 billion valuation the company was said to be seeking as recently as 2024 (Business Today, August 2026), a gap that reflects how much investor sentiment toward Indian lending fintechs cooled between the two conversations. Navi is now reported to be targeting a Rs 3,000 crore ($315 million) IPO, filing a prospectus by around December 2026, with JM Financial, Kotak Mahindra Capital, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan as advisers (Business Today, August 2026).
How it makes money
The part people get wrong about Navi is treating it as primarily a payments or UPI company because that is the most visible, most-advertised part of its app. It isn’t. In FY25, interest income — the money it earns from personal and home loans through Navi Finserv — made up 85% of Navi Technologies’ total revenue, at Rs 2,178 crore, up 21% year-on-year (Entrackr, reporting FY25 results). Fees, commissions and other allied services, which include mutual fund and insurance distribution income, contributed a further Rs 387 crore. UPI, insurance and mutual funds distribution matter for customer acquisition and cross-sell, but the profit-and-loss statement is a lending book wearing a consumer-app skin.
On the cost side, the two biggest lines are finance costs — what Navi itself pays to borrow the money it re-lends, which rose 21% to Rs 850 crore in FY25 — and impairment on financial instruments, the provisioning it sets aside for loans that turn bad, which rose 17% to Rs 578 crore. Employee costs, at Rs 546 crore, were up 17% even as the company pulled back sharply on advertising, cutting that spend 24% to Rs 198 crore. The margin, in other words, sits in the spread between what Navi borrows at and what it charges retail borrowers on personal loans — loans that Navi Finserv has advertised at rates starting near 9.9% but which regulators have twice, in 2024 and 2025, flagged as excessive on parts of the book.
The numbers
Figures below are for Navi Technologies on a consolidated (group) basis, in Rs crore, for the financial year ended 31 March. FY23 and FY24 are not directly comparable because Navi divested its microfinance subsidiary, Chaitanya India Fin Credit, in November 2023; the FY23 figure below includes Chaitanya, the FY24 and FY25 figures do not.
| Metric (Rs crore) | FY23 | FY24 | FY25 |
| Revenue from operations | 2,040.6 (includes Chaitanya) | 2,180 | 2,565 |
| Net profit / (loss) | Not separately disclosed for the group in sources reviewed; the lending subsidiary, Navi Finserv, reported a standalone profit of Rs 172 crore | 358.5 (includes a Rs 189.5 crore one-time gain on the Chaitanya sale) | (126) |
The FY24 profit is misleading if read without its footnote: strip out the one-time Rs 189.5 crore gain from selling Chaitanya, and the underlying FY24 business was closer to break-even, which makes the FY25 swing to an outright Rs 126 crore loss less of a cliff-edge and more of a return to the business’s actual, thinner-margin baseline (Entrackr, reporting both FY24 and FY25 results).
Where the money comes from
Within the lending business specifically, Navi Finserv — the RBI-registered NBFC that also issues public bonds and so files its own separate accounts — posted operating revenue of Rs 2,271.2 crore in FY25, up 19% from Rs 1,906.2 crore in FY24, but its net profit fell 67% to Rs 221.9 crore from Rs 668.8 crore (Inc42, reporting FY25 results). The surprise is that this near-halving in headline growth quality had almost nothing to do with the actual lending business performing worse: Navi Finserv’s “other income” line collapsed to Rs 18.8 crore in FY25 from Rs 707.9 crore in FY24, because FY24’s number had been inflated by a Rs 704.1 crore one-time gain from the Chaitanya sale. Take that lump out, and Navi Finserv’s core lending profit actually held up reasonably well even through two separate RBI lending bans in the same period. Loans under management, meanwhile, were roughly flat — Rs 7,975.6 crore in FY25 versus Rs 8,036.7 crore in FY24 — which for a lender that markets itself on fast growth is itself a quiet admission that the RBI-mandated pauses on fresh disbursals bit into the loan book’s expansion.
Outside lending, Navi’s UPI app has been gaining share from a very low base: it crossed the 1% mark of India’s UPI transaction volumes for the first time in December 2024, with roughly 20 crore monthly transactions (as per NPCI data reported by Business Standard, January 2025, and corroborated by SiliconIndia’s separate report of the same NPCI dataset). That is still a rounding error next to PhonePe and Google Pay, which between them process roughly 80% of UPI volumes, but it marks Navi and rival super.money as the only two entrants of scale to meaningfully dent that duopoly’s grip since 2023.
The risks
Three risks stand out, all disclosed in some form by the company or its regulator rather than invented by outside critics. First, regulatory risk in lending is not a one-off: Navi Finserv has now been ordered to halt fresh loan sanctions twice in twelve months — October 2024 and April 2025 — both times over interest-rate pricing and compliance concerns (Business Standard, October 2024; Inc42, reporting the 2025 restriction and its December 2025 lifting). A business that earns 85% of its revenue from interest income cannot absorb many more of these pauses without real growth damage. Second, asset quality in an unsecured, thin-file lending book is a live concern: loan write-offs surpassed Rs 400 crore in FY24 (Entrackr, October 2024) and impairment charges kept rising in FY25, up 17% to Rs 578 crore, even as the loan book itself barely grew — a combination that typically signals a book under credit stress rather than one that is simply provisioning conservatively. Third, ownership concentration is unusually extreme for a company heading toward a public listing: Sachin Bansal’s roughly 97.8% pre-Prosus shareholding, confirmed in the 2022 DRHP, means minority shareholders — public or private — have historically had almost no influence over the company’s direction, a structure several analysts flagged as atypical when the DRHP was first filed (Inc42, March 2022).
The takeaway
Navi’s arc is a reminder that founder conviction and founder capital can build a large financial-services company fast, but they cannot substitute for a regulator’s approval on the one licence that actually matters to the stated goal. Bansal spent years and thousands of crore trying to turn Navi into a bank; when the RBI said no, the company didn’t collapse — it simply became what it had been building in parallel all along, a lending-led NBFC with payments and asset-management businesses bolted on. The lesson transfers beyond fintech: when a regulated ambition is gated by a single yes-or-no decision outside your control, the business built to hedge that bet is often the one that survives, while the bet itself becomes a historical footnote.
Frequently asked questions
Who founded Navi and when?
Navi was founded in December 2018 by Sachin Bansal, the co-founder of Flipkart, and Ankit Agarwal, a former Deutsche Bank and Bank of America executive, initially under the name BACQ Acquisitions Private Limited before it was renamed Navi Technologies.
Did Navi ever get a banking licence?
No. The Reserve Bank of India rejected the universal banking licence application filed by Chaitanya India Fin Credit, Navi’s microfinance subsidiary, in May 2022, along with five other applicants, without publicly stating its reasons.
Is Navi profitable?
Its record is mixed. Navi Technologies reported a consolidated profit of Rs 358.5 crore in FY24, but that included a Rs 189.5 crore one-time gain from selling its Chaitanya subsidiary; in FY25 the group posted a loss of Rs 126 crore on revenue of Rs 2,565 crore.
Has Navi filed for an IPO?
Yes, twice in effect. It filed a DRHP in March 2022 for a Rs 3,350 crore issue, got SEBI’s approval in September 2022, but never launched it amid weak markets. As of August 2026, it is reportedly working toward a fresh Rs 3,000 crore IPO with a prospectus targeted for around December 2026.
Who are Navi’s biggest investors?
Founder Sachin Bansal has been overwhelmingly the largest investor, having put in close to Rs 4,000 crore of his own money and holding about 97.8% of the company as of its 2022 DRHP. Gaja Capital invested Rs 204 crore in 2020, and Prosus invested $100 million in August 2026 at a $1.3 billion valuation.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Entrackr, September 2025 — “Navi Technologies swings to red with Rs 126 Cr loss in FY25”
- Inc42, June 2025 — “IPO-Bound Navi Finserv’s FY25 Profit Tanks 67% To INR 222 Cr”
- Entrackr, October 2024 — “Navi scales 48% in FY24; loan write-offs surpass Rs 400 Cr”
- Inc42, 2024 — “Navi Finserv Posts INR 1,906 Cr Revenue In FY24 After Sale Of NBFC Subsidiary”
- StartupNews.fyi, August 2023 — “Navi Finserv, Back in Profit, Reports INR 172 Cr Net Profit in FY23”
- TechCrunch, May 2022 — “Sachin Bansal firm fails to secure India bank permit”
- Inc42, May 2022 — “RBI Rejects Sachin Bansal-Backed Chaitanya India Fin Credit’s Application For Universal Banking Licence”
- YourStory, May 2022 — “RBI rejects banking licence application of Sachin Bansal’s Chaitanya India, 5 others”
- Business Standard, October 2024 — “RBI bars Navi Finserv, 3 other NBFCs from sanctioning and disbursing loans”
- TechCrunch, August 2023 — “Sachin Bansal sells Navi microfinancing unit Chaitanya”
- Business Standard, August 2023 — “Ananya Birla’s Svatantra MFI to acquire Chaitanya India Fin for Rs 1,479 cr”
- YourStory, March 2022 — “Sachin Bansal-led Navi Technologies files DRHP to raise Rs 3,350 Cr”
- YourStory, September 2022 — “Sachin Bansal-led Navi Technologies gets SEBI nod for Rs 3,350 Cr IPO”
- Inc42, March 2022 — “Sachin Bansal Owns 97.39% Stakes In IPO-Bound Navi Technologies” and “Decoding Sachin Bansal Navi’s DRHP”
- Business Standard, November 2019 — “Sachin Bansal puts Rs 888 cr in investment vehicle, renames it Navi Tech”
- Business Standard, April 2020 — “Gaja Capital pumps Rs 204 cr in Sachin Bansal’s banking venture Navi Tech”
- Entrackr, April 2020 — “Exclusive: Sachin Bansal appointed Navi’s MD; raises 204 Cr from Gaja Capital”
- TechCrunch, August 2026 — “Sachin Bansal’s fintech Navi raises first outside capital with $100M Prosus investment”
- Business Today, August 2026 — “Navi mulls for Rs 3,000 crore IPO; Sachin Bansal’s fintech firm eyes $2 billion valuation”
- Business Standard, January 2025 — “Navi crosses 1% market share in UPI transactions in December 2024”
- SiliconIndia — “Next to PhonePe & Google Pay, Navi & super.money leads the UPI market” (NPCI data)
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