Startup Deep Dive : Info Edge — a Rs 86 crore side bet now dwarfs the company’s own revenue

Info Edge invested ₹86 crore in Zomato between 2010 and 2013. By 31 March 2025, that stake and a second one in PolicyBazaar’s owner, PB Fintech, were together worth ₹31,500 crore (reported by the company as about $3.7 billion) — more than eleven times the ₹2,850 crore of revenue Info Edge’s own operating business earned that entire year.

This is not a rounding error in a job-portal company’s balance sheet. It is the whole story. Info Edge owns Naukri.com, India’s largest recruitment site, along with 99acres.com, Jeevansathi.com and Shiksha.com. That business is real, profitable and growing at a steady double-digit pace. But for two decades, Info Edge has also acted as an investor, and the two bets it placed early — on food delivery and on insurance distribution — now move its accounts more violently, quarter to quarter, than hiring demand ever could. Understanding Info Edge means holding both identities in view at once: a disciplined internet operating company, and a proprietary investment fund that happens to be listed under a recruitment ticker.

Quick facts

What they do

Info Edge sells classified listings and lead generation to four different kinds of customers under four different brands. Naukri.com lets employers post jobs and search a resume database, charging companies and recruitment agencies for postings, database access and hiring tools rather than charging job seekers. 99acres.com does the same for property developers, brokers and individual sellers in real estate. Jeevansathi.com charges people looking for a spouse for premium matchmaking features. Shiksha.com connects students with colleges and helps education institutes generate admissions leads. Naukri is by far the largest of the four: recruitment solutions made up 75.65 percent of Info Edge’s total revenue in FY25, as reported in the company’s own FY25 annual filings. Sitting alongside all four consumer-facing businesses is a fifth, unlabelled one — a portfolio of stakes in other internet companies, the largest of which are Eternal Limited (which owns Zomato and Blinkit) and PB Fintech (which owns PolicyBazaar and Paisabazaar).

The origin

Sanjeev Bikhchandani studied economics at St Stephen’s College in Delhi, worked for three years in advertising at Lintas, then did his postgraduate management degree at IIM Ahmedabad before joining the consumer marketing firm HMM Ltd in 1989. The idea for Naukri did not come from market research; it came from watching his own colleagues. At HMM, Bikhchandani noticed that his coworkers spent more time reading the job advertisements at the back of business magazines than the editorial content in front. Recruitment classifieds, he concluded, were a business people would pay for directly, rather than a filler around content. He registered Info Edge (India) Private Limited on 1 May 1995 and began selling classified job listings, first offline and then, from 1997, as Naukri.com — a jobs portal running on a server based in India at a time when most Indian companies did not yet have a website of their own.

The struggle years

Info Edge nearly did not survive to see its own idea proven right. From 1997 to 2000, Bikhchandani reinvested whatever Naukri and a sister matrimony site, Jeevansathi, earned back into the business, and by his own account sustained the company through the leaner years partly by taking on journalism work on the side. In April 2000, weeks before the dot-com crash wiped out valuations across the internet sector worldwide, ICICI Ventures wired Info Edge ₹7.3 crore — the company’s only significant round of external venture capital before its IPO. The money came with conditions: ICICI Ventures pushed Info Edge to shut down Jeevansathi temporarily and concentrate entirely on Naukri, and required the company to switch its auditor to one of the then Big Five firms to professionalise its books. Info Edge took both instructions and used the capital, and the timing, to survive a downturn that killed many of its dot-com-era peers outright.

A second, very different kind of near-death came more than two decades later, in FY23. Info Edge’s investment book turned from an asset into a liability that year: the company wrote off its entire investment in food-services startup Bijnis, booked a further hit from writing down its holding in 4B Networks, and posted a Q3 FY23 loss of ₹116 crore. For the full year, Info Edge — a company that had reported a headline profit of ₹12,882 crore only twelve months earlier — closed FY23 with a consolidated net loss of about ₹70 crore, its first annual loss as a listed company. The operating business kept growing throughout; it was the investment side of the balance sheet that briefly broke the story Info Edge liked to tell about itself.

The turning point

The single event that best explains what Info Edge actually is happened in July 2021, when Zomato listed on the Indian stock exchanges. Until that point, Info Edge’s Zomato holding was accounted for as an investment in an associate company, carried at cost with its share of Zomato’s losses adjusted in over the years. The moment Zomato began trading publicly, Info Edge lost “significant influence” under accounting rules, the stake was reclassified as a plain financial investment, and it had to be marked to its new, IPO-inflated market value in one stroke. Alongside a similar reclassification of the PolicyBazaar stake after PB Fintech’s own listing months later, this produced unrealised mark-to-market gains of ₹7,867 crore on Zomato and ₹2,280 crore on PB Fintech, recognised as exceptional items in a single financial year. Info Edge’s core recruitment, real estate, matrimony and education businesses generated ₹1,589 crore of revenue in FY22. Its reported consolidated net profit that same year was ₹12,882 crore — eight times its revenue — almost entirely because two portfolio companies happened to go public. Nothing about how many people Naukri hired that year, or how many resumes 99acres’ brokers browsed, explains that number. The IPOs do.

The money behind it

Info Edge’s own funding history is unusual for a company now sitting on an ₹81,000-crore-plus market value: it barely raised any external capital at all. Beyond the ₹7.3 crore ICICI Ventures brought in during April 2000 — which reshaped the company’s focus and governance more than its cash position — Info Edge grew on its own earnings until it listed on the NSE and BSE in November 2006, becoming the first Indian internet company to go public on a domestic exchange. The IPO proceeds, and the cash the operating business threw off afterwards, became the capital Info Edge used to become an investor in its own right rather than continuing to rely on outside backers.

Two bets made with that capital defined the company. In 2008, Info Edge invested in PolicyBazaar before the insurance-comparison site had even launched publicly. Then, starting in August 2010 and continuing through 2013, it put a cumulative ₹86 crore into Zomato across four funding rounds, at one point becoming the food-delivery company’s controlling shareholder before divesting part of its holding in September 2015. Both companies eventually listed independently — PB Fintech in November 2021 and Zomato (renamed Eternal in 2024) in July 2021 — turning two early, illiquid startup cheques into permanent, tradeable lines on Info Edge’s balance sheet. Beyond these two, Info Edge has spread smaller cheques across a wide startup portfolio: as of its FY25 disclosures, the company had invested a cumulative ₹3,959 crore across 111 companies, which it valued at a combined fair market value of ₹36,855 crore, according to Info Edge’s own reporting relayed by Entrackr.

How it makes money

The operating business runs on a subscription-and-credits model rather than a marketplace take rate. Naukri does not charge job seekers, and it does not take a cut of any salary; it sells recruiters access — job posting slots, resume database searches, and hiring-workflow tools — typically billed upfront and recognised as revenue over the life of the contract. That distinction between cash collected and revenue recognised matters at Info Edge: in FY26, the standalone Naukri-led business collected ₹3,178 crore in billings but recognised only ₹3,052 crore as revenue, with the difference sitting on the balance sheet as deferred revenue to be recognised as service is delivered in future quarters. Standalone operating profit for FY26 was ₹1,138 crore, a 37 percent margin, on the back of billings growth of 10 percent. The part outsiders most often get wrong is treating Info Edge’s headline consolidated net profit as a read on how that operating business is doing. It usually is not. In Q4 FY26, for instance, Info Edge reported consolidated net profit of ₹756 crore, of which ₹497 crore was “other income” — largely investment and treasury income rather than recruiters paying for job posts — according to Entrackr’s reporting of the results. Meanwhile, separately, unrealised swings in the fair value of the Eternal and PB Fintech stakes — non-cash and routed through other comprehensive income rather than the profit and loss statement — cut a combined ₹8,161 crore from Info Edge’s net worth in that same quarter (₹5,874 crore on Eternal, ₹2,287 crore on PB Fintech), without touching reported revenue or operating profit at all.

The numbers

Consolidated revenue has grown every year since FY23; consolidated net profit has been far less linear, because it absorbs gains and losses from the investment book on top of a steadily improving operating business.

The FY23 loss followed write-offs in smaller startup bets rather than in Naukri, 99acres, Jeevansathi or Shiksha, all of which stayed in growth mode. The most recent full quarter on record, Q1 FY27 (April to June 2026), showed consolidated revenue of ₹880.7 crore, up 11 percent year-on-year, and consolidated net profit of ₹490.1 crore, up 43 percent, with profit attributable to Info Edge’s own shareholders at ₹445.7 crore.

Where the money comes from

By revenue, Info Edge is overwhelmingly a recruitment company: Naukri alone accounted for 75.65 percent of total revenue in FY25, with the remaining quarter split across 99acres, Jeevansathi and Shiksha. The surprise sits below the revenue line, not within it. Once other income and investment fair-value movements are added back in, the four consumer-facing businesses can, in some quarters, contribute a minority of what shows up as bottom-line profit — Q4 FY26’s ₹497 crore of “other income” against ₹756 crore of total net profit is one example, and FY22’s ₹12,882 crore profit against ₹1,589 crore of operating revenue is the most extreme one on record. Geographically, the operating businesses are almost entirely India-focused, unlike the investee companies: Eternal and PB Fintech both serve overwhelmingly domestic Indian consumers as well, but they operate in categories — quick commerce and food delivery, insurance distribution — that have nothing to do with recruitment, real estate, matrimony or education. Info Edge’s segment mix, in other words, only tells you where its revenue comes from. It does not tell you where its value, or in a given quarter, its profit, comes from.

The risks

The clearest risk is that Naukri’s core business is tied to corporate hiring cycles, and hiring is cyclical. A slowdown in IT-sector recruitment weighed on billings growth in recent years, and Info Edge has responded by pushing harder into non-IT hiring to reduce that concentration, a shift the company has described in its own investor commentary. The second, larger risk is the one this entire piece has been about: the Eternal and PB Fintech stakes routinely move Info Edge’s reported net worth and, at times, its profit by thousands of crore in a single quarter, in either direction, based on stock prices Info Edge does not control. A ₹5,874 crore fair-value loss on Eternal alone in Q4 FY26 shows how large that swing can be even when nothing has changed at Naukri or 99acres. Third, the smaller end of Info Edge’s 111-company startup portfolio carries genuine venture-style risk: Bijnis and 4B Networks were written down to zero, and any founder-run recruitment or classifieds business will always face competition from well-capitalised entrants — LinkedIn and global players on the recruitment side, and new-age vertical startups across real estate and matrimony — that can erode market share faster than Info Edge’s own product cycles move.

The takeaway

The lesson in Info Edge is not really about job portals or even about picking the right startups to back. It is about what a founder does with the cash a good, boring, cash-generative business throws off once that business stops needing all of it. Bikhchandani did not diversify Info Edge into new classified categories only; he used Naukri’s profits to write two early cheques into businesses he had no operational control over, then let those cheques compound for a decade and a half without needing to touch them. The discipline was as much about what Info Edge chose not to spend its own cash reserves on, as it was about the two bets that worked. Any founder sitting on a profitable core business eventually faces the same fork: reinvest only in what you already run, or risk a slice of the surplus on something you believe in but cannot control. Info Edge’s twenty-year answer to that question, not its stock price on any single day, is the actual case study.

Frequently asked questions

Is Info Edge the same company as Naukri.com?

Naukri.com is Info Edge’s largest brand and its main revenue source, but Info Edge (India) Limited is the listed parent company. It also owns 99acres.com, Jeevansathi.com and Shiksha.com outright, and holds minority investment stakes in other listed companies, principally Eternal (Zomato’s parent) and PB Fintech (PolicyBazaar’s parent).

How much did Info Edge invest in Zomato and PolicyBazaar?

Info Edge invested a cumulative ₹86 crore in Zomato across four rounds between August 2010 and 2013. It invested in PolicyBazaar starting in 2008, before the site had publicly launched; Info Edge has not disclosed a single cumulative figure for that investment in the sources reviewed for this piece.

Why does Info Edge’s profit swing so much from year to year?

Because its consolidated profit includes fair-value gains or losses on its stakes in Eternal and PB Fintech, plus other investment and treasury income, on top of a comparatively steady operating profit from Naukri, 99acres, Jeevansathi and Shiksha. A single quarter’s stock-price move in either investee company can add or subtract thousands of crore from Info Edge’s reported numbers.

Is Info Edge more valuable as a recruitment company or as an investor?

Both roles matter. Naukri-led operations generate the great majority of Info Edge’s revenue — 75.65 percent from recruitment alone in FY25 — and produce steady, growing operating profit. But the combined value of its Eternal and PB Fintech stakes, reported by the company at ₹31,500 crore as of 31 March 2025, was worth many times the group’s annual operating revenue, which is why analysts and the company itself discuss Info Edge as much as an investment holding as an internet operator.

What are the biggest risks to Info Edge going forward?

A slowdown in corporate hiring, especially in IT services, would directly hit Naukri’s billings. Separately, further declines in Eternal or PB Fintech’s share prices would reduce Info Edge’s net worth even without any change at its own operating businesses. Smaller startup investments in its wider portfolio also carry the usual venture-style risk of write-offs, as happened with Bijnis and 4B Networks in FY23.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Wikipedia, “Info Edge” — accessed September 2026
• Wikipedia, “Sanjeev Bikhchandani” and related founder profiles (StartupTalky) — accessed September 2026
• Screener.in, Info Edge (India) Ltd consolidated financials and shareholding pattern — accessed 18 September 2026
• CompaniesMarketCap.com, Info Edge market capitalisation — September 2026
• Entrackr, “Info Edge posts Rs 2,345 Cr revenue and Rs 70 Cr loss in FY23” — May 2023
• Entrackr, “Info Edge posts Rs 750 Cr revenue in Q4 FY25; profit jumps 7.7X” — May 2025
• Entrackr, “Info Edge pegs Zomato, PB Fintech holdings at $3.7 billion” — 2025
• Entrackr, “Info Edge posts Rs 756 Cr PAT in Q4 FY26; other income stands at Rs 497 Cr” — May 2026
• Entrackr, “Info Edge reports over Rs 8,000 Cr Q4 valuation hit on Eternal, PB Fintech holdings” — 2026
• Outlook Business, “Info Edge’s Eternal Win: Stake Value Crosses ₹37,000 Cr After Zomato Parent’s Record Rally” — 22 July 2025
• Business Insider India, “Info Edge has lost over $1.2 billion on its investment in Zomato, PolicyBazaar” — 2022
• YourStory, “Info Edge’s investments power profit surge as core recruitment business holds firm” — May 2026
• Free Press Journal, “Info Edge Q1 FY27 Net Profit Rises 43% To Rs 490.1 Crore, Revenue Climbs 11% To Rs 880.7 Crore” — August 2026
• TipRanks / ScanX / Elite Wealth, reports on Info Edge raising its PB Fintech stake to 12.43% via NCLT-approved amalgamation of Makesense Technologies — December 2025
• Moneycontrol via TradingView, “Power of conviction: Info Edge’s Rs 86 crore investment in Eternal is now worth Rs 32,000 crore” — 2026
• A Junior VC, “Is 80,000 Cr InfoEdge India’s First True Internet Conglomerate?” — company portfolio and investment figures
• Business Standard, “Despite headwinds Info Edge stock rally continues on strong Q4 performance” — 2023

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