Startup Deep Dive : Xoxoday — FY23 loss widened 7X even as revenue crossed Rs 816 crore

Xoxoday’s Indian operating entity, Nreach Online Services, booked a loss of ₹62 crore in FY23, nearly seven times wider than the year before, even as revenue crossed ₹816 crore (~$85 million) that year (Registrar of Companies filings, reported by Entrackr, November 2023).

Three years on, in January 2026, the same company told investors it was “growing profitably” while closing a fresh Series C round and pencilling in an IPO for late 2027 or early 2028 (PR Newswire, 14 January 2026). Reconciling a loss-making FY23 ledger with a profitable, IPO-track 2026 pitch is the real story here, and it runs through a Singapore merger, a rebrand, and a business model that looks like SaaS but spends like a trading company.

Quick facts

What they do

Xoxoday sells the infrastructure that lets businesses hand out rewards, incentives, and loyalty points without building that plumbing themselves. Its customers are enterprises, not consumers: companies buy Plum to send gift cards, experiences, and cash payouts to employees, customers, or channel partners; Empuls to run internal recognition, surveys, and engagement programmes; Compass to automate sales-incentive and commission payouts; and Loyalife to build customer loyalty and referral programmes. The company says it serves more than 5,000 businesses, including Infosys, Freshworks, H&M, and AT&T, across a rewards catalogue spanning more than 100 countries (PR Newswire, 14 January 2026; Xoxoday About Us page, accessed September 2026).

The origin

The company began in 2012 in Bengaluru as Giftxoxo, a digital and experience-gifting startup founded by Sumit Khandelwal and Manoj Agarwal, who were soon joined by Kushal Agarwal and Abhishek Kumar. Manoj Agarwal had earlier worked at Yahoo and Flipkart, and the founding team’s insight was narrow at first: corporate gifting in India was still built on physical vouchers and manual processes, and a digital catalogue of experiences and gift cards could be a cleaner way to do it (StartupTalky, accessed September 2026; Xoxoday About Us page, accessed September 2026). The founders bootstrapped their way to a first Bengaluru office before taking on seed capital from Kshatriya Ventures in 2013 to expand into Mumbai and Delhi.

The struggle years

Giftxoxo, as a standalone consumer-facing gifting product, did not scale the way its founders expected. By the company’s own later account, the idea was “ahead of its time” and the market for digital gift experiences was too immature to support a business on its own; the founders shut Giftxoxo down in early 2018 and rebuilt around a horizontal rewards-and-incentives platform, rebranded Xoxoday the year before, in 2017 (Xoxoday blog, “The Journey from Giftxoxo to Xoxoday,” accessed September 2026). That pivot bought the company a decade of growth, but it did not remove financial risk. After a flat 10% revenue gain in FY21, Xoxoday’s revenue jumped 2.5 times to ₹680 crore in FY22 — and the company swung from profit into its first loss, of ₹8.96 crore, that same year (Entrackr, May 2023). FY23 made the pattern starker: revenue grew a further 20% to ₹816 crore, but the loss widened nearly sevenfold to ₹62 crore, as the cost of buying the vouchers and rewards it resells outpaced the revenue those sales brought in (Entrackr, November 2023). Growth and cash-burn arrived together, unsoftened by the rebrand that preceded them.

The turning point

The clearest inflection point is dated: in February 2022, Giift — a Singapore-based loyalty infrastructure company backed by Apis Partners’ Apis Growth Fund II — invested $30 million in Xoxoday and took a majority strategic interest, combining primary and secondary capital (PR Newswire, Business Wire, YourStory, all February 2022). On one side of that event sat an India-focused SaaS company that had just posted its first loss on ₹680 crore of FY22 revenue. On the other side, three years later, sat a combined Giift-Xoxoday group operating in more than 100 countries with over 60 million users and roughly $1 billion in cumulative gross transaction value, large enough that in March 2025 Giift folded its own name into Xoxoday’s and rebranded the entire group globally as Xoxoday, backed by a fresh $70 million investment from Apis Growth Fund II (PR Newswire, 4 March 2025). The Indian entity’s own filings still show losses through FY23, but the deal itself is what turned a single-country product company into the front end of a multi-country group with the balance sheet to make a Series C and IPO plan credible by 2026.

The money behind it

• 2013 — seed: Kshatriya Ventures backs Giftxoxo’s expansion beyond Bengaluru; amount undisclosed (Xoxoday About Us page, accessed September 2026).
• 2016 — strategic round: Mahindra Holidays invests to strengthen enterprise reach ahead of the Xoxoday rebrand; amount undisclosed (Xoxoday About Us page, accessed September 2026).
• February 2022 — Giift/Apis Partners, $30 million: Giift, backed by Apis Growth Fund II, takes a majority interest through a mix of primary and secondary capital, funding international expansion and tech infrastructure (PR Newswire, Business Wire, YourStory, February 2022).
• March 2025 — Apis Growth Fund II, $70 million: Investment accompanies the global rebrand of Giift to the Xoxoday name, positioned as growth capital for the merged group (PR Newswire, 4 March 2025).
• January 2026 — Series C: Backed by existing investors Apis Partners and 57 Stars; amount not disclosed, with the company describing itself as “growing profitably” and targeting an IPO in late 2027 or early 2028 (PR Newswire, 14 January 2026).

Cumulative lifetime funding is a genuinely contested number: Tracxn puts it at $101 million across six rounds, CB Insights at $121.5 million across four rounds, and Inc42 at $30.52 million across four rounds (all accessed September 2026) — trackers disagree sharply enough on both round count and total that no single figure can be stated with confidence. What is independently confirmed, across multiple named-outlet reports, is at least $100 million in disclosed capital across the 2022 and 2025 rounds alone.

How it makes money

Xoxoday looks like a SaaS company from its marketing but runs, financially, much more like a reseller. In FY23, voucher and reward sales made up 97% of collections — ₹791 crore of the year’s inflows — while the single largest cost line was the procurement of those same coupons and rewards, at ₹729 crore, or 83% of total expenditure (Entrackr, November 2023).

• Money in: resale of gift cards, vouchers, and experiences to enterprise buyers (the bulk of revenue), plus subscription fees for the Empuls, Compass, and Loyalife software layers.
• Money out: procurement of the vouchers and rewards it resells (₹729 crore in FY23), employee costs (₹21.2 crore in FY22, up 18.7% year on year), legal and professional fees, and advertising (Entrackr, May 2023 and November 2023).
• Where the margin sits: on the thin spread between what Xoxoday pays brands for vouchers and what it charges enterprise buyers, plus the software subscription layer on top — not on the pass-through voucher value itself.
• What people get wrong: because Empuls and Compass are marketed as SaaS products, it is easy to assume Xoxoday carries SaaS-like margins. The filings say otherwise — unit economics show the company spent ₹1.08 to earn ₹1 of revenue in FY23, and EBITDA margin was -6% that year, widening from -1% in FY22 (Entrackr, November 2023).

The numbers

Three consecutive years of Registrar of Companies filings for the Indian entity are independently reported by Entrackr; no FY24 or FY25 filing has yet been made public in verifiable reporting, so those years are omitted rather than estimated.

Sources: Entrackr, May 2023 (FY21–FY22) and Entrackr, November 2023 (FY22–FY23).

Where the money comes from

• Customer base: more than 5,000 businesses globally as of January 2026, up from a purely India-focused book before the 2022 Giift deal (PR Newswire, 14 January 2026).
• User reach: over 60 million individual users engaged through client programmes (PR Newswire, 14 January 2026); the company’s own site states more than 65 million (Xoxoday About Us page, accessed September 2026) — the gap is unresolved between the two sources.
• Geographic footprint: operations run from nine offices across North America, India, Asia-Pacific, and EMEA, with a rewards catalogue spanning more than 100 countries per the January 2026 announcement, though the company’s own website claims 175-plus countries (PR Newswire, 14 January 2026; Xoxoday About Us page, accessed September 2026).
• The surprise: for the specific employee rewards-and-recognition product category, independent market-share analysis shows Xoxoday’s tracked customer base is nearly evenly split between India (40.6%) and the United States (34.4%), with the United Kingdom a distant third (8.1%) — a reminder that an Indian-founded company’s largest single market, by this measure, is now the US rather than India (6sense market-share analysis, accessed September 2026, reported estimate).

The risks

• A trading-company cost structure inside a SaaS story: with voucher procurement running at 83% of FY23 expenditure and EBITDA margin at -6% that year, widening from -1% in FY22, the core rewards-resale business has not yet shown it can turn a profit at scale, regardless of how the software layer is marketed (Entrackr, November 2023).
• Regulatory dependence on voucher tax treatment: India’s tax authorities only settled, via a CBIC circular on 31 December 2024, that prepaid gift vouchers and cards are treated as money rather than a taxable supply, removing years of GST ambiguity around exactly the instruments Xoxoday resells at volume (CBIC Circular No. 243/37/2024-GST, 31 December 2024). A shift back toward taxing voucher distribution or commission income would compress margins that are already thin.
• Competitive intensity from better-capitalised rivals: the Indian gift-card and incentive infrastructure market includes Pine Labs, which acquired QwikCilver in 2019 and operates at a larger balance-sheet scale, alongside global players such as Blackhawk Network in the wider rewards space — competitors that can undercut on take rate or bundle rewards distribution with existing payments relationships (public company disclosures and reporting on Pine Labs and QwikCilver, accessed September 2026).

The takeaway

Xoxoday’s most transferable lesson is not about rewards or gifting specifically — it is about what a founder does when a consumer product fails but the underlying infrastructure is still useful to someone else. Giftxoxo, as a direct-to-consumer gifting brand, did not work. Rather than iterate on the same customer, the founders redirected the same catalogue and payments plumbing toward enterprise buyers, and later handed majority control to a better-capitalised partner in exchange for the balance sheet and geographic reach a single India-based company could not build alone. The financials since suggest that trade bought scale before it bought profitability, and the two have not yet arrived together in a filing anyone outside the company can verify.

Frequently asked questions

What does Xoxoday do?

Xoxoday sells software and infrastructure that lets businesses run rewards, employee recognition, sales-incentive payouts, and customer loyalty programmes, primarily through its Plum, Empuls, Compass, and Loyalife products.

Who founded Xoxoday and when?

It was founded in Bengaluru in 2012 as Giftxoxo by Sumit Khandelwal, Manoj Agarwal, Kushal Agarwal, and Abhishek Kumar; Abhimanyu Choudhary joined as a co-founder in 2018. The company rebranded to Xoxoday in 2017.

Is Xoxoday the same as Giift?

They are now the same brand. Giift, a Singapore-based loyalty infrastructure company backed by Apis Partners, took a majority stake in Xoxoday in February 2022, and in March 2025 the combined group dropped the Giift name and rebranded globally as Xoxoday.

How much money has Xoxoday raised?

Confirmed, named rounds include $30 million from Giift/Apis Partners in February 2022, $70 million from Apis Growth Fund II in March 2025, and an undisclosed Series C in January 2026. Third-party trackers disagree on the lifetime total, with figures ranging from about $30 million to $121.5 million depending on the source.

Is Xoxoday profitable?

The Indian operating entity’s most recent public filing, for FY23, showed a net loss of ₹62 crore on ₹816 crore of revenue. In January 2026, the company told investors it was “growing profitably,” a company-stated claim for which no independently verified financial filing is yet public.

Sources

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

• Entrackr, “Fintech firm Xoxoday’s revenue flies to Rs 680 Cr in FY22,” May 2023
• Entrackr, “Xoxoday’s revenue crosses Rs 800 Cr in FY23; losses spike 7X,” November 2023
• PR Newswire, “Giift backed by Apis Partners Rebrands as Xoxoday Globally,” 4 March 2025
• PR Newswire, “Xoxoday Raises Series-C to Accelerate Global Expansion,” 14 January 2026
• PR Newswire / Business Wire / YourStory, “Xoxoday raises US $30 million from Giift and Apis Partners,” February 2022
• Xoxoday, “About Us” (xoxoday.com/about-us), accessed September 2026
• StartupTalky, “Xoxoday Story: Rewards & Recognition Infrastructure Platform,” accessed September 2026
• Xoxoday blog, “The Journey from Giftxoxo to Xoxoday,” accessed September 2026
• CBIC Circular No. 243/37/2024-GST, 31 December 2024
• Tracxn, Xoxoday company and funding profile, accessed September 2026
• CB Insights, Giift/Xoxoday financials profile, accessed September 2026
• Inc42, Xoxoday company profile, accessed September 2026
• 6sense, Xoxoday market-share analysis (Employee Rewards and Recognition category), accessed September 2026
• Reporting on Pine Labs and QwikCilver acquisition (2019), accessed September 2026

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