Startup Deep Dive : Setu — the API bridge Pine Labs bought for $70-75 million

Setu spent ₹5.6 to earn every rupee of operating revenue in the same year its owner, Pine Labs, was preparing a stock market listing. Four years earlier, in June 2022, Pine Labs had paid $70-75 million (₹672-720 crore at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026, Trading Economics) for a seven-employee-per-crore-of-revenue API startup that most Indians confuse with a government contact-tracing app of nearly the same name.

That confusion is understandable. This piece is about Setu the fintech company — founded in Bengaluru in 2018, sold to Pine Labs in 2022, and now the plumbing behind millions of bill payments and bank-data transfers a day — not Aarogya Setu, the health app the Government of India built during the COVID-19 pandemic and still runs through the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Digital India, 2026). One moves money and data between banks and businesses; the other moves health records between citizens and hospitals. Both borrow the Hindi word for “bridge.” Only one of them is a Pine Labs company.

Quick facts

What they do

Setu sells application programming interfaces, not apps. Banks, insurers, lenders, retail chains and other startups plug into Setu’s “Bridge” developer console to add financial functions to their own products without building the plumbing themselves: pulling and paying bills, verifying a customer’s identity, moving money over UPI, or pulling a customer’s bank statements with their consent. Early bank partners named at launch included Kotak Mahindra Bank, ICICI Bank, Axis Bank and SBI Mutual Fund (TechCrunch, April 2020); by 2026 the company describes its customer base as spanning banks, NBFCs, insurers, lending companies, retail enterprises and startups (Setu product pages, 2026). In effect, Setu is a supplier to other financial businesses rather than a consumer-facing brand — which is one reason it is far less known than the companies it powers.

The origin

Nikhil Kumar was not a startup founder before Setu; he was a government fellow. As a volunteer and later a fellow at the iSPIRT Foundation, he worked on the developer ecosystem around India’s Unified Payments Interface and the Goods and Services Tax Network, then helped run the hackathon-style effort that shipped the BHIM app after demonetisation — an app that logged 10 million downloads in its first ten days (Forbes India, 30 Under 30, 2020). That experience left him convinced that public digital-payments rails were only half the story: banks had opened APIs, but most businesses still had no easy way to consume them. Sahil Kini, who met Kumar through the same iSPIRT network, brought the other half — he had previously built Magnet Works, a hardware-and-software venture for industrial internet applications, and had worked as a principal at Aspada Investments evaluating early-stage companies (Entrackr, April 2019; TechCrunch, April 2020).

In August 2018 the two co-founded Setu — Hindi for “bridge” — on the premise that the missing piece of India’s digital-public-infrastructure stack was not more government rails but the connective layer that let ordinary companies use them: bill collection, savings, credit and payments, packaged as modular APIs a developer could integrate in days rather than months (Entrackr, April 2019).

The struggle years

Setu’s setbacks were not the dramatic near-collapse of some startup stories; they showed up in the unit economics and in a slow build-up of revenue scale, both fully documented in its filings. Two are worth naming without softening them.

• Four years to double-digit-crore revenue. Despite raising a seed round in 2019 and a Series A in 2020, Setu’s operating revenue stood at only ₹11.6 crore in FY22 — four fiscal years after founding (Inc42, November 2023, citing FY22-FY23 filings). For an API infrastructure business, that is a long runway before revenue caught up with the funding raised.
• Unit economics that went the wrong way before they went right. In FY23, Setu’s operating revenue grew 22.4% to ₹14.2 crore, but total expenditure rose 77.3% to ₹79.6 crore and the net loss more than doubled to ₹62 crore from ₹28.4 crore a year earlier — meaning the company was spending ₹5.6 to earn every rupee of operating revenue, with an EBITDA margin of around -348% (Inc42, November 2023). A large part of that jump was a 500% surge in ESOP costs, from ₹4.8 crore to ₹29.8 crore, alongside rising cloud infrastructure spend of ₹9.4 crore (Inc42, November 2023).

Leadership continuity added a third strain, later rather than earlier: co-founder Sahil Kini stepped down as chief executive in April 2024, handing the role to former SAP India executive Anand Raisinghani, before going on to be named CEO of the Reserve Bank Innovation Hub in July 2025 (btabloid, April 2024; Elets BFSI, July 2025). Co-founder Nikhil Kumar followed by stepping away from his day-to-day role in June 2026, writing on LinkedIn that “it is time for me to step away from my everyday role” (Inc42, June 2026). Within roughly two years of each other, both founders had left daily operations at the company they built.

The turning point

The clearest before-and-after line in Setu’s history runs through a nine-day stretch in the summer of 2022. On 23 June 2022, Pine Labs announced it was acquiring Setu for a reported $70-75 million in a deal that let Setu keep its brand, its business and its roughly 90-100-person team (Entrackr, June 2022; Business Standard, June 2022). Eleven days later, on 4 July 2022, Setu’s subsidiary Agya Technologies received an in-principle licence from the Reserve Bank of India to operate as an Account Aggregator — the framework that lets a customer consent to share bank data across institutions (Inc42/IndiaInfoline coverage, July 2022).

The numbers either side of that stretch are stark. Before it: a company with ₹11.6 crore of FY22 operating revenue and roughly 90-100 employees, still proving its unit economics. After it: by FY24, revenue had reached ₹35.2 crore, up from ₹13.8 crore the year before — a jump of almost 2.5 times — while the net loss narrowed to ₹41.2 crore from ₹62.4 crore (YourStory, November 2024). Headcount, per third-party tracking, had grown to 384 by August 2026 (Tracxn, August 2026). Pine Labs’ balance sheet and distribution, paired with a fresh regulatory licence, gave Setu a scale of customer reach an independent Series A-stage startup would have taken years to build alone.

The money behind it

• Seed, April 2019: $3.5 million led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Bharat Innovation Fund (Entrackr, April 2019). This funded the initial API build-out across bills, savings, credit and payments.
• Series A, April 2020: $15 million led by Falcon Edge Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners’ US fund, with Lightspeed India Partners and Bharat Inclusion Seed Fund also participating (TechCrunch, April 2020). This round funded expansion of “Collect,” Setu’s recurring-payments product for loan EMIs, mutual fund subscriptions and insurance premiums (TechCrunch, April 2020).
• Total raised before acquisition: approximately $18.5 million (₹178 crore) across the two rounds (Entrackr, June 2022).
• Exit, June 2022: acquired in full by Pine Labs for a reported $70-75 million — Setu’s third acquisition offer that year for Pine Labs, after Qfix Infocomm in February and Mosambee in April 2022 (Entrackr, June 2022; PYMNTS, June 2022). Inc42 calculated the price at roughly 39 times Setu’s FY22 operating revenue of ₹11.6 crore (Inc42, November 2023).

Since the acquisition, Setu has raised no further external funding of its own; its capital now comes from its parent, Pine Labs, which itself raised ₹3,900 crore in a November 2025 initial public offering priced at ₹221 a share and now trades at a market capitalisation of ₹22.8’000 crore, or ₹22,798 crore (Business Standard, November 2025; Screener.in, September 2026).

How it makes money

Setu earns fees for moving money and data on behalf of other regulated businesses, not from consumers directly. The mechanics, as far as they are publicly disclosed:

• Money in: per-transaction or platform fees charged to banks, billers, lenders, insurers and enterprises for API access to BBPS bill collection, UPI acceptance and payouts, Account Aggregator data pulls, KYC/eSign checks and, more recently, its Sesame large-language-model tools for banking (Setu product documentation, docs.setu.co, 2026; Inc42, coverage of Sesame launch, May 2024).
• Costs out: cloud infrastructure (₹9.4 crore in FY23, up from ₹4.3 crore), employee salaries and wages (₹28.1 crore in FY23), and — a cost specific to a founder-led company being scaled up — employee stock option expenses, which alone hit ₹29.8 crore in FY23 (Inc42, November 2023).
• Where the take rate shows up: Setu does not publish a per-transaction fee schedule, so the precise take rate on BBPS or UPI volumes is not independently verifiable and is not stated here as a number.
• The part people get wrong: Account Aggregator, the licence that generated the most press coverage, is not necessarily the biggest revenue line. Setu’s own AWS case study describes an average of 10 million monthly BBPS bill-payment transactions against 5 million daily Account Aggregator data requests as of the case study’s publication in 2026 (AWS case study, “Setu Supports 10 Million Monthly Digital Payments Securely on AWS,” 2026) — meaning the older, less-discussed bill-payments business still runs at a larger transaction count than the newer data-sharing licence, even though the licence is what drew the regulatory spotlight.

The numbers

The FY23 figures carry a small discrepancy between the two outlets — ₹14.2 crore versus ₹13.8 crore in revenue, and ₹62.0 crore versus ₹62.4 crore in net loss — most likely a restatement or rounding difference between filings pulled at different times. Both are shown rather than picking one, per the contested-figures rule for this piece. What both sources agree on: revenue grew through FY22-FY24, and after a sharp widening in FY23, the loss narrowed again in FY24.

Where the money comes from

Setu does not publish a revenue split by product line or geography, so the figures below describe reach and customer mix rather than a percentage-of-revenue breakdown — a genuine gap in public disclosure, not filled in here with invented numbers.

• Product lines by transaction volume: BBPS bill collection and payment across more than 21,000 registered billers (Setu product pages, 2026), averaging 10 million monthly transactions (AWS case study, 2026); Account Aggregator data-sharing at roughly 5 million daily requests (AWS case study, 2026); UPI acceptance and payouts; KYC, Aadhaar eSign and eNACH; and, since 2024-25, generative-AI products including the Sesame banking LLM and an agentic bill-payment assistant launched on ChatGPT and Claude in December 2025 (Inc42, May 2024; Pine Labs media centre, December 2025).
• Customer verticals: banks and NBFCs, insurers, lending companies, retail enterprises and other startups use Setu’s APIs, per the company’s own customer description (Setu product pages, 2026); named early bank partners include Kotak Mahindra Bank, ICICI Bank, Axis Bank and SBI Mutual Fund (TechCrunch, April 2020).
• Geography: Setu’s business is India-only; its APIs are built around India-specific rails (UPI, BBPS, the RBI Account Aggregator framework) that do not exist in this form outside the country (Setu product pages, 2026).
• The surprise: the Account Aggregator licence, the one that generated the most media coverage and regulatory attention at launch, runs at roughly half the daily volume of the older, more mundane bill-payments business (AWS case study, 2026) — a reminder that press attention and transaction share do not always move together.

The risks

• Regulatory dependency. Nearly all of Setu’s product lines sit directly on rules set by the RBI and the National Payments Corporation of India — BBPS interchange, UPI processing charges, and Account Aggregator consent architecture. Parent Pine Labs’ own IPO prospectus flagged that regulatory changes to payments and fee structures could affect how the group earns revenue (Inc42, coverage of Pine Labs DRHP, June 2025) — a risk that applies directly to Setu’s fee-based model.
• Continued negative unit economics. Even after FY24’s improvement, Setu’s FY23 EBITDA margin of roughly -348% and its ₹41.2 crore FY24 net loss show a business that has not yet proven it can earn more than it spends (Inc42, November 2023; YourStory, November 2024). A widening loss, rather than a narrowing one, in any future year would be a genuine warning sign, not a rounding error.
• Leadership discontinuity. Both co-founders — Sahil Kini in April 2024 and Nikhil Kumar in June 2026 — have left day-to-day roles at the company they built, within roughly two years of each other, leaving execution to a CEO hired from outside the founding team (btabloid, April 2024; Inc42, June 2026).
• Crowded licensing field. Setu’s Account Aggregator arm competes against at least a dozen other RBI-licensed NBFC-AAs, including Finvu, CAMS Finserv, OneMoney and Anumati (operated by Perfios) — some with larger live financial-information-provider networks than Setu’s (industry ecosystem mapping, 2026).

The takeaway

Setu’s arc says something about how infrastructure businesses in India’s digital-public-goods era actually get built and get paid: not by owning a consumer brand, but by wiring themselves into rails — UPI, BBPS, Account Aggregator — that a government agency and a handful of banks made available to everyone at once. The company’s founders had spent years building those very rails from the inside, at iSPIRT and on BHIM, before spotting that the businesses meant to use them still could not easily connect. That is the transferable lesson: the biggest opportunity in a newly opened public system is rarely the system itself, but the unglamorous, fee-earning layer that makes it usable by companies that will never touch the regulation directly. Setu built that layer for six years as an independent company, and has spent the four years since its acquisition proving it inside someone else’s balance sheet.

Frequently asked questions

What does Setu do?

Setu sells application programming interfaces that let banks, insurers, lenders, retailers and other startups add financial functions — bill payments, identity verification, UPI transactions, and consent-based bank-data sharing — to their own products, rather than building that infrastructure themselves (TechCrunch, April 2020; Setu product pages, 2026).

Who founded Setu, and when?

Sahil Kini and Nikhil Kumar founded Setu in Bengaluru in August 2018. Kumar had worked on India’s UPI developer ecosystem and the BHIM app at iSPIRT Foundation; Kini had founded an industrial-internet venture, Magnet Works, and worked at Aspada Investments (Entrackr, April 2019; Forbes India, 2020).

Why did Pine Labs acquire Setu, and for how much?

Pine Labs acquired Setu on 23 June 2022 for a reported $70-75 million (₹672-720 crore) to add API infrastructure and open-banking capability to its own merchant-payments business, while letting Setu keep its brand, business and roughly 90-100-person team (Entrackr, June 2022; PYMNTS, June 2022; Business Standard, June 2022).

Is Setu profitable?

No. Setu reported a net loss of ₹41.2 crore in FY24, an improvement from a ₹62.4 crore loss in FY23, on operating revenue of ₹35.2 crore (YourStory, November 2024). Its losses have narrowed but the business has not turned profitable in any disclosed fiscal year.

Is Setu the same as the Aarogya Setu health app?

No. Aarogya Setu is a health platform built and operated by the Government of India through the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, originally for COVID-19 contact tracing and now linked to the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (Digital India, 2026). Setu, the subject of this article, is an unrelated private fintech company, now owned by Pine Labs, that sells payments and data-sharing APIs to businesses. The two share only the Hindi word for “bridge.”

Sources

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

• Entrackr, “Pine Labs acquires API infrastructure startup Setu,” June 2022
• Business Standard, “Pine Labs acquires API fintech startup Setu in $70 mn-$75 mn deal,” June 2022
• PYMNTS, “Pine Labs Acquires Setu in Reported $70M to $75M Deal,” June 2022
• TechCrunch, “Setu raises $15M to help developers connect with banks,” April 2020
• Entrackr, “Sahil Kini and Nikhil Kumar float fintech platform Setu,” April 2019
• Forbes India, “Nikhil Kumar: BHIM’s star, now building fintech bridges” (30 Under 30, 2020)
• YourStory, “Pine Labs-owned Setu’s revenue jumps almost 2.5X, loss narrows in FY24,” November 2024
• Inc42, “Pine Labs Owned Setu Spent INR 5.6 To Earn Every Rupee In FY23,” November 2023
• Inc42, “Pine Labs-Owned Setu’s Cofounder Nikhil Kumar Steps Down,” June 2026
• btabloid, “Pine Labs’ Setu Appoints Anand Raisinghani as CEO,” April 2024
• Elets BFSI, “Sahil Kini Named CEO of Reserve Bank Innovation Hub (RBIH),” July 2025
• Inc42 / IndiaInfoline, coverage of Setu’s (Agya Technologies) in-principle RBI Account Aggregator licence, July 2022
• AWS, “Setu Supports 10 Million Monthly Digital Payments Securely on AWS” (case study), 2026
• Setu product and documentation pages, setu.co and docs.setu.co, 2026
• Inc42, coverage of Sesame banking LLM launch, May 2024
• Pine Labs media centre, “Setu Launches India’s First Agentic Bill Payments Experience,” December 2025
• Business Standard, “Pine Labs makes positive D-St debut,” November 2025
• Screener.in, Pine Labs Ltd company page (market capitalisation), accessed September 2026
• Inc42, coverage of Pine Labs DRHP risk factors, June 2025
• Tracxn, Setu company profile (employee count), August 2026
• Digital India (MeitY), “Aarogya Setu” initiative page, accessed 2026

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