Startup Deep Dive : Jai Kisan — a lending platform whose revenue fell a third even as its loan book grew 45x

In FY25, Jai Kisan’s revenue fell by more than a third, down to ₹30.9 crore ($3.2 million) from ₹47.9 crore the year before, even as the company points to a lending book that grew roughly 45 times over in four years. That contradiction — a shrinking topline sitting on top of a fast-growing credit business — is the real story of this eight-year-old rural fintech.

Jai Kisan was built on a bet that most urban-focused lenders ignored: rural India does not lack demand for credit, it lacks anyone willing to price it fairly. Two former private-equity analysts tested that bet by living in a village and running a farm-supply shop themselves. What they found reshaped how the company lends, who it partners with, and — after a 2024 regulatory move — whether it lends its own money at all.

Quick facts

What they do

Jai Kisan sells credit, not seeds or tractors. It lets rural merchants — the agri-input dealers, equipment sellers and produce aggregators who already sell to farmers on informal credit — offer that same credit formally, funded by banks and NBFCs rather than out of the merchant’s own pocket. Farmers get point-of-sale loans of a few thousand to a few tens of thousands of rupees to buy seeds, pesticides or machinery; merchants get paid upfront and take on none of the collection risk; and Jai Kisan sits in the middle, running the underwriting, the technology and, since August 2024, a chunk of the lending itself through its own non-banking financial company (NBFC).

The origin

Arjun Ahluwalia and Adriel Maniego met as undergraduates at Texas A&M University and both went on to careers in private equity and debt restructuring in the United States. In 2017 they took a sabbatical to look at gaps in India’s financial system, and the gap that struck them was geographic as much as economic: in urban India, a loan for a phone was a few taps away; a few hundred kilometres away, a farmer could not get affordable credit for seeds.

Rather than build a lending app from an office, the two moved to a village roughly eight hours from Mumbai and rented a small storefront near a sugar mill, where they sold pesticides and seeds directly to farmers for about six months. The finding that came out of that experiment became the company’s founding thesis: close to 70% of the farmers who walked in expected to buy on credit, not cash. As Ahluwalia has put it, merchant credit in rural India is not a service farmers might choose — it is an expectation they already carry (Blume Ventures, investor commentary). Jai Kisan piloted its model across Karnataka and Maharashtra for eight months before it launched formally.

The struggle years

The village experiment did not hand the founders a working business model — it took two more hard corrections to get there, and even after that the numbers stayed thin for years.

• 2017-18 — the direct-to-farmer model failed on cost. Jai Kisan’s first approach was to underwrite and lend to farmers directly. Customer acquisition in scattered, low-trust rural markets made that prohibitively expensive per loan, and the founders scrapped it in favour of lending through merchants who already had farmers’ trust — the B2B2C structure the company still runs today.
• By March 2020 — three years in, the loan book was still tiny. Assets under management stood at just ₹16 crore, a scale that reflected how slowly trust-based rural distribution builds, even with a working model (Blume Ventures, investor commentary).
• FY21 — revenue was barely a rounding error. The company reported operating revenue of ₹4.96 crore against a loss of ₹3.36 crore for the year ended March 2021 (as reported by Entrackr).
• FY23 — losses ran 1.6 times ahead of revenue. Jai Kisan posted a loss of ₹69.5 crore on revenue of ₹43.82 crore, one of its widest loss-to-revenue gaps to date (TheKredible, citing regulatory filings).

The turning point

The clearest inflection came in May 2021, when Jai Kisan closed a $30 million Series A round led by Mirae Asset, with Syngenta Group Ventures joining as a new backer alongside existing investors Arkam Ventures, Better Capital, Blume Ventures, NABVENTURES and Prophetic Ventures (AgFunderNews; Inc42, May 2021). Before that round, the company had raised a comparatively modest sum: a $1.5 million seed in March 2019 and a roughly ₹30 crore (about $3.9 million) pre-Series A in June 2020 — a little under $5.5 million in total across two years. The Series A alone was more than five times that combined figure, in a single close.

The capital showed up in the loan book. Assets under management climbed from ₹16 crore in March 2020 to approximately ₹725 crore by March 2024 — close to a 45-fold increase over four years (Blume Ventures, investor commentary) — while annual credit facilitated rose from about ₹24 crore in FY20 to roughly ₹3,000 crore in FY24. The Series A was the capital event that let a village-tested model turn into a national-scale distribution business.

The money behind it

• Seed — March 2019: $1.5 million, led by Blume Ventures, Prophetic Ventures and Better Capital.
• Pre-Series A — June 2020: ₹30 crore (about $3.9 million), led by Arkam Ventures (then Unitary Helion), with NABVENTURES — NABARD’s venture fund — joining alongside existing backers Blume Ventures, Prophetic Ventures and Better Capital (Business Standard, June 2020).
• Series A — May 2021: $30 million in equity and debt, led by Mirae Asset; Syngenta Group Ventures came in as a new investor (AgFunderNews; Inc42).
• Series B — July 2022: $50 million in a mix of equity ($18 million) and debt ($32 million); new investors GMO Venture Partners, Yara Growth Ventures and DG Daiwa Ventures joined existing backers Blume Ventures, Arkam Ventures, Mirae Asset and Snow Leopard Ventures (Entrackr, July 2022; CB Insights).
• Series B extension — January 2023: An additional venture round of about $3 million from existing investors.
• Series B-II — April 2025: ₹26.5 crore (about $3 million), from Mirae Asset Venture (₹12.5 crore), Unitary Fund (₹12 crore) and Blume Ventures (₹2 crore), at a reported post-money valuation of about $180 million (Entrackr, April 2025).
• Total raised to date: Trackers disagree on the exact cumulative figure — Tracxn puts it at $88.6 million across roughly 10 rounds, while CB Insights lists $107.29 million; Blume Ventures, one of the investors, describes the company’s lifetime raise as “$90 million-plus.”
• Latest valuation: About $180 million post-money as of April 2025 (Entrackr), essentially flat against the $180-190 million range reported for the July 2022 round (CB Insights) — three years of fresh capital without a markup, on the numbers available.

How it makes money

For most of its life, Jai Kisan has not been the lender of record on most of the credit it facilitates — banks and NBFC partners have put up the money, and Jai Kisan has been paid for finding the borrower, underwriting the risk and running the technology. That changed only partly in August 2024, when it acquired a majority stake in Kushal Finnovation Capital and picked up an NBFC licence of its own, letting it originate some loans directly rather than only as an intermediary.

• Interest income — over 39% of FY23 operating revenue, earned where Jai Kisan holds a lending or co-lending position (TheKredible, citing regulatory filings).
• Technology fee income — over 32% of FY23 operating revenue, charged to partner banks/NBFCs and corporates for the underwriting, scoring and disbursal technology stack.
• Commission income — nearly 17% of FY23 operating revenue, earned on loans sourced and disbursed through Jai Kisan’s merchant and corporate network but funded by third-party lenders.
• Service fees and other income — the remainder, from onboarding, collections support and ancillary services to its 350-plus corporate partners.

The part people tend to get wrong is assuming Jai Kisan is simply a digital moneylender. For most of its history it has been closer to a fee-and-commission-earning technology and distribution layer sitting on top of banks’ balance sheets — which capped its upside on every loan but also capped its own capital risk. The 2024 NBFC acquisition is a deliberate trade of that safety for a bigger share of the interest margin, and for the ability to co-lend directly with public-sector banks rather than only through intermediated arrangements.

The numbers

Sources: FY21 figures per Entrackr; FY23 and FY24 per TheKredible, citing regulatory filings; FY25 per Inc42, citing regulatory filings. FY22 figures were not available in any tracker consulted and have been omitted rather than estimated.

• FY24 improvement: loss narrowed 26.6% year-on-year even as revenue grew 9.3%, driven partly by employee costs falling to 31.6% of spending from 46% in FY23 (TheKredible).
• FY25 reversal: revenue fell 35.5% year-on-year to ₹30.9 crore, while the net loss held near FY24 levels at ₹51.7 crore — the first year in the filed record where the loss did not shrink alongside cost discipline (Inc42).

Where the money comes from

Jai Kisan runs two core product lines and reaches customers overwhelmingly through intermediaries rather than direct acquisition.

• Supply chain financing — credit for merchants and dealers buying agricultural inventory from corporates, or for corporates extending purchase credit down their dealer chain.
• Farmer financing — point-of-sale loans of roughly ₹5,000 to ₹50,000 for seeds, pesticides and small equipment, disbursed within about a week of application.
• FY24 reach: about ₹3,000 crore of credit facilitated to roughly 15,000 merchants and 120,000 farmers in the year (Entrackr, August 2024).
• Cumulative reach, as of August 2024: about ₹6,000 crore disbursed since inception, touching over 800,000 rural individuals through more than 350 corporate partners (Blume Ventures, investor commentary).

The surprise is where the concentration sits. Jai Kisan talks about reaching hundreds of thousands of farmers, but its own investor disclosures show that its top 20 corporate partners alone account for about ₹72,000 crore of turnover and roughly ₹20,000 crore of the credit extended through the platform (Blume Ventures, investor commentary). The individual farmer is the headline customer; a small set of large agribusiness partners is where the platform’s real distribution leverage — and its concentration risk — actually lives.

The risks

• Channel concentration. With roughly ₹20,000 crore of credit extended through just its top 20 corporate partners, the loss or distress of even a handful of large partners could dent disbursal volumes far out of proportion to Jai Kisan’s overall partner count of 350-plus (Blume Ventures, investor commentary).
• Regulatory exposure from the outsourced-lending model. The Reserve Bank of India’s Digital Lending Guidelines, issued in September 2022, tightened rules on outsourcing arrangements between regulated lenders and digital lending service providers — the exact model Jai Kisan ran for its first seven years before it acquired its own NBFC licence via Kushal Finnovation Capital in August 2024 (RBI guidelines, September 2022; Entrackr, August 2024).
• Revenue has not grown in a straight line, and losses have not shrunk on schedule. Revenue fell 35.5% in FY25 to ₹30.9 crore after rising in FY24, while the net loss held close to ₹51.7 crore — a reminder that the path to profitability is not yet proven at the current scale (Inc42).
• Headcount data is inconsistent across trackers, which limits outside visibility into operating scale. Tracxn counts 68 employees as of August 2025, down 56% year-on-year, while Inc42’s company database lists a headcount closer to 660 — a gap wide enough that neither figure should be taken as settled.

The takeaway

Jai Kisan’s founders learned, the expensive way, that in a low-trust rural market you do not out-compete the local merchant for the farmer’s attention — you lend through him instead. That insight built a distribution network worth ₹6,000 crore of cumulative credit facilitated. But intermediation cuts both ways: as long as Jai Kisan was mainly a fee-earning layer on top of other people’s balance sheets, its upside on every rupee lent was capped, and its growth was only as diversified as its largest partners. Owning an NBFC changes the economics, but it also converts an asset-light technology business into a capital-intensive, closely regulated lending business — a slower, costlier path, and one where the FY25 numbers suggest the transition is still being paid for rather than paying off.

Frequently asked questions

What does Jai Kisan do?

Jai Kisan is a rural fintech that arranges point-of-sale credit for farmers and merchants in agricultural supply chains, funded historically by partner banks and NBFCs and, since August 2024, partly through its own NBFC, Kushal Finnovation Capital.

Who founded Jai Kisan and when?

Arjun Ahluwalia and Adriel Maniego founded the company in 2017, after quitting private-equity careers and running a farm-supply storefront in a village near Mumbai to test their lending model firsthand.

How much has Jai Kisan raised and who backs it?

Reported cumulative funding ranges from $88.6 million (Tracxn) to $107.29 million (CB Insights) across roughly 10 rounds. Backers include Mirae Asset, Blume Ventures, Arkam Ventures, NABVENTURES, Syngenta Group Ventures and Unitary Fund, among others.

Is Jai Kisan profitable?

No. It has posted a net loss every year for which figures are available, including a ₹51.7 crore loss in FY25 on revenue of ₹30.9 crore (Inc42).

Does Jai Kisan lend its own money now?

Partly. Since acquiring a majority stake in NBFC Kushal Finnovation Capital in August 2024, Jai Kisan can originate and hold some loans directly, in addition to its original role of facilitating loans funded by partner banks and NBFCs.

Sources

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

• AgFunderNews, “Jai Kisan nets $30m Series A funding from Mirae Asset, Syngenta,” May 2021
• AgFunderNews, “Fintech startup Jai Kisan banks $3.94m,” 2020
• Inc42, “Jai Kisan Bags $30 Mn From Mirae Asset Amid Big Push For Rural Lending,” May 2021
• Inc42, “Jai Kisan Raises $3.9 Mn In Pre-Series A Funding Led By Arkam Ventures,” 2020
• Inc42, Jai Kisan company financials profile, accessed September 2026
• Entrackr, “Update: Jai Kisan raises $50 Mn in ongoing Series B round,” July 2022
• Entrackr, “Jai Kisan acquires majority stake in Kushal Finnovation, gets NBFC license,” August 2024
• Entrackr, “Jai Kisan raises fresh funds in extended Series B,” April 2025
• Business Standard, “Rural fintech startup Jai Kisan raises Rs 30 cr from NABARD-backed fund,” June 2020
• Business Standard, “Rural fintech startup Jai Kisan gets RBI approval for NBFC acquisition,” August 2024
• TheKredible, “Jai Kisan Narrows FY24 Losses by 26.6%, Revenue Climbs to Rs 48 Cr,” 2024
• TheKredible, Jai Kisan financials profile, accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, Jai Kisan company profile, accessed September 2026
• CB Insights, Jai Kisan financials profile, accessed September 2026
• Blume Ventures, “Bridging the India-Bharat Divide: Jai Kisan’s Journey to Empower a Billion Indians,” investor commentary, accessed September 2026
• Reserve Bank of India, Guidelines on Digital Lending, September 2022

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