Startup Deep Dive : Ketto — revenue fell, profit grew anyway

Ketto charges nothing to list a fundraiser, and yet the private company behind it reported a fatter profit margin in FY25 than the year before. Its revenue fell 13.2% to Rs 74.7 crore (about $7.8 million at $1 ≈ Rs 96.0 as of 18 September 2026, Trading Economics) even as net profit kept climbing, a contradiction that only makes sense once you see what Ketto actually charges for.

The platform now says it has moved over Rs 2,000 crore (roughly $208 million) for causes since 2012, across 7.2 million donors and more than 300,000 fundraisers, as of May 2025. But an independent academic study of 119,493 of its campaigns found that barely one in thirty ever hit its target. Both numbers are true at once, and this piece is about why.

Quick facts

What they do

Ketto is an online crowdfunding platform that lets individuals, families and non-profits raise money from the public, mostly in small amounts from many donors, for medical treatment, personal emergencies, education, animal welfare, creative projects and disaster relief. A person who needs Rs 15 lakh for a liver transplant, or an NGO that needs Rs 5 lakh for a school kitchen, builds a page with a story, photos and a target, shares the link on WhatsApp and social media, and Ketto handles verification, payment collection and payout. Medical causes make up more than half of everything hosted on the platform, according to an academic analysis of its public campaign data, which makes Ketto less a marketplace of ideas, in the Kickstarter sense, and more a parallel financing channel for healthcare costs that insurance and the public system do not fully cover.

The origin

Varun Sheth spent his pre-Ketto years as an interest rate swap dealer at ICAP, working towards a CFA and an FRM and, by his own account, closing deals worth more than Rs 1,000 crore before the monotony of the job pushed him to quit. He had already been volunteering with NGOs such as Care India and the Akshara Foundation since school, and he kept running into the same problem: small non-profits were paying enormous sums to raise money the old way. Kunal Kapoor, already lending his name to a handful of causes as a Bollywood actor, saw the same thing from the other side and later described it bluntly: offline fundraising drives could eat “as high as 60 per cent of the amount raised” in costs, according to an afaqs interview from November 2022. The insight behind Ketto, whose name is meant to read as “key to tomorrow”, was that the internet and social sharing could replace most of that cost with a webpage and a payment gateway.

The three co-founders divided the work along fairly natural lines: Sheth as CEO, Kapoor lending credibility and a public face, and Zaheer Adenwala, who had done two stints in product management, at Affinity and then at Directi’s Media.net, joining a few months after the 2012 launch to build and run the technology as co-founder and CTO. Rather than pitch donors directly, the founders began by pitching NGOs on the idea that a crowdfunding page could out-perform door-to-door collection, using early adopters to prove the model before trying to win the trust of individual medical fundraisers, who would come to dominate the platform within a few years.

The struggle years

Crowdfunding was not an easy sell in 2012. Kickstarter itself was only three years old, and India had no real precedent for asking strangers for money online outside of religious or political appeals. Kapoor has recalled friends and would-be backers asking him, in effect, what he thought he was doing, and suggesting he put his celebrity to more conventional use instead, per the same afaqs interview. Early institutional funding was similarly hard to come by: Ketto’s first outside capital, an angel round, did not close until November 2013, more than a year after launch, according to CB Insights’ funding timeline, and the company leaned on NGO partnerships rather than paid marketing to prove that people would actually pay through a browser for causes they could not see with their own eyes.

Trust, not technology, has remained the platform’s harder problem well past its startup years. In August 2023, a dermatologist publicly known online as “The Skin Doctor” flagged a campaign on Ketto that had described an infant’s congenital skin condition, ichthyosis, as a burn injury to attract more sympathy and money, a case widely reported at the time, including by OpIndia. It was one of a recurring pattern of fabricated or exaggerated medical stories that verification teams have had to chase after the fact rather than before a campaign goes live, and it is a problem industry-watchers were already flagging years earlier: an Inc42 feature from December 2020 on crowdfunding trust noted that Ketto, Milaap and ImpactGuru all relied on manual, after-the-fact checks with hospitals rather than any external audit, leaving the sector’s credibility resting almost entirely on each platform’s own diligence.

The turning point

If one period made Ketto a mainstream name rather than a niche one, it was the second wave of COVID-19 in India through April and May 2021. Oxygen shortages and hospital bed crunches turned the platform into a real-time relief channel: more than 4,000 fundraisers on Ketto collected upward of $19 million for oxygen supply during the crisis, and celebrities amplified individual campaigns to audiences the platform could never have reached on its own. Cricketer Virat Kohli and actor Anushka Sharma put in Rs 2 crore toward a Rs 7 crore Ketto campaign, and Sachin Tendulkar donated Rs 1 crore to the platform’s “Mission Oxygen” drive, both reported in May 2021. A single fundraiser for the NGO Doctors For You, launched on 25 April 2021 with a Rs 5 crore target, pulled in more than Rs 1.30 crore in its first twelve hours, according to an ANI press release carried by Business Standard.

The numbers either side of that period say the rest: Ketto had taken roughly a decade, to 2020, to move an estimated Rs 1,100 crore cumulatively through the platform, by the IIM Ahmedabad case study’s account; within about four more years it had nearly doubled that to over Rs 2,000 crore, per 2025 company disclosures. The pandemic did not just add volume, it normalised the idea, for a huge new set of Indians, that a crowdfunding link forwarded on WhatsApp was a legitimate way to pay a hospital bill.

The money behind it

Ketto’s own capital raising has been modest next to the sums it moves for others, and the trackers do not agree on exactly how modest.

• Tracxn puts total funding at $3.7 million across six rounds and 88-89 investors, with the most recent a Series A on 26 October 2022 led by Beenext.
• CB Insights instead lists total funding at $19.6 million across six rounds, with the largest single round a “Series A-II” of $14.56 million on 29 July 2020.
• Both trackers agree the earliest institutional money came in as an angel round in November 2013, and that named backers include Beenext, the India Internet Fund and long-time director-investor Pradyumna Dalmia, who joined the board in October 2014.
• Latest valuation is undisclosed in every primary filing checked for this piece; a handful of aggregator sites list a figure near $49 million, but it could not be verified against a primary source and is cut here rather than repeated as fact.

What each backer changed is harder to pin down publicly than the cheque sizes: Dalmia’s board seat has coincided with the company’s shift toward a subscription and premium-plan revenue model rather than a straight cut of donations, while Beenext’s 2022 round arrived as Ketto was pushing into tier-two and tier-three cities, the growth vector CEO Varun Sheth has continued to describe as the platform’s next phase.

How it makes money

Ketto’s headline pitch is “zero platform fee,” and for the free plan that is literally true; the money comes from elsewhere in the transaction and from fundraisers who pay to be featured.

• Payment gateway fee: a 3% charge on funds actually collected, covering both domestic and foreign payment gateways, applies regardless of plan, per Ketto’s published pricing page.
• GST: 18% is charged additionally on Ketto’s success fee and the payment gateway fee, not on the total funds raised, per the same pricing page.
• Paid plan tiers: the free “Bronze” plan (0% platform fee, applicable to fundraisers started after 15 August 2020) sits below “Silver” (5% platform fee, a dedicated expert and faster approval) and “Gold” (7% platform fee, higher visibility and 12-hour approval); “Plus” and “Amplify” are custom-priced enterprise tiers with whitelabel microsites and dedicated campaign support.
• Add-ons: an optional Rs 1,999 plan bundled with a health-tech partner, refundable within seven days if unused.
• Corporate and CSR channel: Ketto Foundation, a separate registered trust, channels employer and CSR donations that require 80G tax receipts, a distinct revenue and compliance track from the main consumer platform.

The part people consistently get wrong is assuming “zero platform fee” means the campaign keeps 100% of what it raises. Between the payment gateway cut and GST on fees, a Bronze-plan fundraiser that collects Rs 10 lakh loses a low-single-digit percentage before a rupee reaches the beneficiary; a Gold-plan fundraiser that pays for visibility loses closer to a tenth. Ketto’s real margin sits not in a headline platform fee but in the payment-processing spread, the paid-tier upsell, and enterprise CSR contracts, which is also why the company can advertise “0% fee” and still run a profitable balance sheet.

The numbers

Ketto Online Ventures Pvt Ltd, the operating company behind ketto.org, discloses financials to the Ministry of Corporate Affairs. Two consecutive years of audited-style revenue are corroborated across independent aggregators; profitability trends are directionally consistent across sources even where absolute rupee figures are not published.

• FY25 revenue of Rs 74.7 crore and FY24 revenue of Rs 86.1 crore are corroborated by both TheCompanyCheck’s MCA-sourced profile and Inc42’s company database, both accessed September 2026.
• Tofler’s financial summary puts FY25 net profit margin at 2.36% with net profit growth of 76.4% year-on-year; EMIS separately puts FY25 net profit growth at 72.23% for the same entity and period, a reasonably close corroboration given the two use different data pipelines.
• A widely repeated figure attributing a roughly Rs 55 lakh FY25 loss belongs to Ketto Foundation, the separate charitable trust used for CSR and 80G donations, not to Ketto Online Ventures Pvt Ltd, the fee-earning platform company; the two entities’ financials should not be merged, and this piece keeps them apart.
• Independently verifiable FY23 revenue and profit figures in absolute rupee terms could not be located behind a paywall-free source in time for this piece and are cut rather than estimated; aggregators note a “3.41% revenue decrease and 21.09% profit decrease” for that year without giving base figures, so the percentages are omitted here too.

Where the money comes from

Ketto does not publish a formal geography or category revenue split, but an academic study of 119,493 campaigns collected between August 2019 and August 2024 gives a detailed picture of where the money that flows through the platform actually comes from and goes.

• By cause: medical campaigns account for more than 50% of all campaigns hosted, the single largest category by volume.
• By success rate: only 3.51% of campaigns in the dataset (4,053 of 119,493) reached their fundraising goal, and medical campaigns had the lowest success rate of any category, despite being the largest by count.
• The surprise: 54.83% of campaigns in the dataset received zero donations at all, meaning the platform’s headline totals are driven by a small minority of campaigns that go viral or get celebrity amplification, not by an even spread across all fundraisers.
• By geography: Maharashtra accounted for 29.32% of campaigns, followed by Karnataka (8.34%) and Uttar Pradesh (7.56%), a concentration in India’s wealthier, more urbanised, more internet-penetrated states.
• By donor origin: 7.53% of individual donations came from outside India, mostly from the Indian diaspora, with the US dollar the second most-used currency after the rupee.
• By channel: user-generated sharing, primarily WhatsApp forwards and personal social media posts, rather than platform-driven discovery, is what campaign organisers and Ketto’s own leadership describe as the main traffic source, with about 80% of transactions historically concentrated in tier-one cities as of the company’s May 2025 disclosures, a skew CEO Varun Sheth has said he wants to correct by expanding into 250-plus smaller cities.

The risks

• Fraudulent or exaggerated campaigns: verification depends on hospital estimate letters and manual checks rather than any external audit; the August 2023 “Skin Doctor” case, where an infant’s skin condition was misrepresented as a burn injury to solicit sympathy, showed how a fabricated story can collect real donations before it is caught, per OpIndia’s reporting.
• Structurally low success rates on the platform’s biggest category: with medical campaigns both the largest cause category and the least likely to hit target, per the 2025 academic study of Ketto’s own campaign data, a large share of people who turn to the platform in a medical emergency may raise little or nothing, a reputational and mission risk distinct from Ketto’s own corporate financials.
• Regulatory and payments-rail dependence: crowdfunding platforms in India operate without a dedicated regulatory framework or mandatory external audit, a gap flagged by Inc42’s December 2020 feature on the sector; any future tightening of KYC, anti-money-laundering or payment-aggregator rules by the Reserve Bank of India would fall directly on Ketto’s payment-gateway-dependent revenue line.
• Revenue concentration in a shrinking top line: FY25 revenue fell 13.2% even as profit improved, which points to cost control rather than growth as the current source of profitability, a combination that is harder to sustain over multiple years than genuine top-line expansion.

The takeaway

Ketto’s most transferable lesson is not about crowdfunding at all: it is that a company can build a defensible business on a “free” headline while quietly monetising the parts of the transaction customers do not scrutinise as closely, the payment rail, the premium tier, the enterprise contract. That model works only as long as trust holds, because the one thing Ketto is actually selling is the credibility that a stranger’s medical story is real. The 2023 fraud case and the platform’s own 3.51% campaign success rate are reminders that the trust layer, not the payment layer, is where a crowdfunding business is genuinely fragile.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded Ketto and when?

Ketto was founded on 15 August 2012 in Mumbai by Varun Sheth, Kunal Kapoor and Zaheer Adenwala, and was incorporated as Ketto Online Ventures Private Limited on 12 December 2012.

Does Ketto really charge a zero platform fee?

Its free “Bronze” plan charges 0% platform fee, but a 3% payment gateway fee plus 18% GST on fees still applies, and paid “Silver” and “Gold” plans charge 5% and 7% platform fees respectively for faster approval and more visibility, per Ketto’s published pricing page.

How much money has Ketto raised as a company, and how much has it moved for causes?

As a company, Ketto has raised between $3.7 million (Tracxn) and $19.6 million (CB Insights) in outside funding, depending on the tracker. Separately, and much larger, the platform says it has moved over Rs 2,000 crore for individual causes since 2012, as of company disclosures reported in 2025.

Is Ketto profitable?

Ketto Online Ventures Pvt Ltd reported a 2.36% net profit margin in FY25 on revenue of Rs 74.7 crore, with profit reported growing year-on-year even as revenue fell 13.2% from FY24’s Rs 86.1 crore, according to Tofler and EMIS company filings data.

What are the biggest risks facing Ketto?

Fabricated or exaggerated medical campaigns that pass manual verification, a structurally low campaign success rate in its largest category (medical causes), the absence of dedicated crowdfunding regulation in India, and a revenue base that is currently shrinking even as margins improve.

Sources

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

• afaqs!, “With 7.2 mn donors, Ketto aims to take crowdfunding to tier-2 and beyond,” May 2025
• afaqs!, “‘What the hell are you doing?’ puzzled friends asked Kunal Kapoor when he was co-founding Ketto,” November 2022
• Ketto (ketto.org), “Online Fundraising Platform Pricing & Plans,” accessed September 2026
• TheCompanyCheck, “Ketto Online Ventures Private Limited – FY 2026 Profile,” accessed September 2026
• Tofler, “Ketto Online Ventures Private Limited – Financials,” accessed September 2026
• EMIS, “Ketto Online Ventures Private Limited Company Profile,” accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, “Ketto – Company Profile, Funding and Investors,” accessed September 2026
• CB Insights, “Ketto Online Ventures – Financials,” accessed September 2026
• Inc42, “Ketto – Funding, Revenue & Investors,” accessed September 2026
• Inc42, “Amid Boom, India’s Budding Online Crowdfunding Startups Face Trust Test,” December 2020
• IIM Ahmedabad Case Study, “Ketto: India’s Most Successful Crowdfunding Platform,” cases.iima.ac.in, accessed September 2026
• ANI/ThePrint, “Ketto marks its 10th anniversary by reinventing the donation landscape in India,” August 2022
• ANI/Business Standard, “Help pours for Doctors For You NGO to combat COVID-19 crisis, crowdfunding on Ketto.org for emergency oxygen & COVID care supply,” April 2021
• Gulf News, “Coronavirus: India cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar donates $135,000 to ‘Mission Oxygen’,” May 2021
• The Tribune, “Virat Kohli, wife Anushka begin campaign for raising funds for Covid relief,” May 2021
• arXiv preprint 2509.12616, “Ketto and the Science of Giving: A Data-Driven Investigation of Crowdfunding for India,” September 2025
• OpIndia, “‘The Skin Doctor’ exposes scam on Ketto by Unani practitioner Qamar Ali,” August 2023
• CrazyEngineers, “Ketto Co-Founder On Building A Powerful CrowdFunding Platform For India’s Changemakers” (Zaheer Adenwala interview), accessed September 2026
• Bharat Gaurav Awards, “Mr. Varun Sheth – CEO Ketto.org,” accessed September 2026

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