Namaste Credit spent a decade building the plumbing that let banks lend to small businesses they had never met: by October 2019 it had connected more than 80 lenders, including HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank and Axis Bank, and pushed over ₹2,000 crore in loans to roughly 25,000 SMEs through that pipe, as its founders told Entrepreneur India. The contradiction: five years later, the company that pitched itself as India’s SME-credit rail reported revenue collapsing 60.5% to ₹16.9 crore (~$1.8 million) in FY24, and in March 2025 most of its team and clients walked onto the payroll of a different company altogether.
This is the story of Namaste Credit: a Bengaluru fintech built by two former Moody’s risk modellers, bootstrapped for four years before a single institutional rupee arrived, and eventually folded into Decimal Technologies after its own numbers stopped adding up. The rails it built were real. Whether a company that never carried a loan on its own books could keep owning them was the harder question.
Quick facts
| Company | Namaste Credit (corporate entity listed by Inc42 Datalabs as Opendoors Fintech Private Limited) |
| Founded | Idea conceived 2014; company incorporated 2015, Bengaluru |
| Founder(s) | Gaurav Anand and Lucas Bianchi (2014); Krishnan Parameswaran joined as co-founder and CTO (2015) |
| Businesses | LoanHub (SME loan marketplace), iCAM (digital underwriting platform for lenders), Namaste Biz (banking tool for small businesses) |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹16.9 crore, FY24 (year to March 2024), down 60.5% year-on-year |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Net loss of ₹12.8 crore, FY24 |
| Listed | Private (no IPO filed) |
| Market value / last valuation | Not publicly disclosed as of the 2021 pre-Series B round |
| Key shareholders / CEO | Gaurav Anand (CEO); backed by Nexus Venture Partners and Amicus Capital Partners |
What they do
Namaste Credit built two connected products around one problem: small and mid-sized Indian businesses could not get bank loans quickly, and banks could not underwrite them cheaply. LoanHub is the marketplace side, matching SMEs applying for working capital or term loans with a network of more than 80 banks and NBFCs. iCAM is the software side, a digital underwriting and loan-origination engine that Namaste Credit licensed to those same lenders so they could process SME applications faster and with less manual paperwork. A third, smaller product, Namaste Biz, offered banking tools aimed at small businesses directly. The company never lent its own money; it sold access and software to the institutions that did.
The origin
Gaurav Anand and Lucas Bianchi met working in risk and credit modelling at Moody’s, and the idea for Namaste Credit came out of a conversation the two had around 2014 about how badly Indian SME lending matched the technology already used to price consumer credit risk elsewhere. Loan approvals for small businesses routinely took weeks; the same lenders could score a personal loan in minutes. Anand and Bianchi decided the fix was not a new lender but a layer that sat between existing lenders and existing borrowers, doing the matching and the underwriting math both sides were doing badly on their own. Krishnan Parameswaran joined as co-founder and chief technology officer in 2015 to build that layer. The company ran on roughly $1 million raised from family and friends, choosing to prove the model with real loans and real banks in Bengaluru before it went looking for institutional capital, as Anand later told Entrepreneur India.
The struggle years
The first test was patience. Namaste Credit stayed bootstrapped from its 2014 founding conversation until April 2018, nearly four years, before it closed a priced institutional round. That is an unusually long runway for a fintech chasing a market moving as fast as digital lending was in India through 2016 and 2017, and it meant proving unit economics on channel-partner commissions and lender licensing fees alone, without a war chest to buy growth.
- 2014 to April 2018: bootstrapped on roughly $1 million from family and friends, no institutional funding, while building the lender network and underwriting engine (Entrepreneur India, October 2019).
- FY24 (year to March 2024): revenue fell 60.5% year-on-year to ₹16.9 crore from ₹42.7 crore in FY23, alongside a net loss of ₹12.8 crore and total assets down 69% year-on-year to ₹6.5 crore (Inc42 Datalabs financial filing analysis).
The second test came much later and was harder to soften. A company whose entire pitch was volume through other people’s balance sheets watched that volume roughly halve in a single fiscal year, and its own balance sheet shrink even faster than its losses did.
The turning point
The clearest inflection point is not a funding round. It is March 2025, when Decimal Technologies, a no-code BFSI software company, announced that Namaste Credit was joining its business. Fifteen of Namaste Credit’s remaining clients moved onto Decimal’s books, taking Decimal’s total client count from 30 to 45. Around 100 Namaste Credit employees moved with them, and the combined team opened a new office in Bangalore, according to matching announcements carried by CXOToday and CIO&Leader in March 2025. Decimal’s chief executive Lalit Mehta framed it as welcoming “Namaste Credit as a part of the Decimal Technologies family”; Namaste Credit’s Gaurav Anand described it as a way to make the combined AI and no-code platform scale faster for lenders. Before: an independent SME-lending platform running its own client and product roadmap. After: 15 client relationships and 100 people running inside a larger no-code platform business, with Namaste Credit’s underwriting technology as one input rather than a standalone company.
The money behind it
- Seed: approximately $1 million from family and friends, before 2018, used to build the first version of the marketplace and underwriting engine (Entrepreneur India, October 2019).
- Series A: $3.8 million, announced April 2018, led by Nexus Venture Partners; the round was earmarked for expanding the channel-partner network and technology-licensing partnerships with lenders (Inc42, April 2018).
- Pre-Series B: undisclosed amount, closed around May 2021, led by growth-equity firm Amicus Capital Partners, which took Namaste Credit into its BFSI-technology portfolio (Amicus Capital Partners portfolio page; Tracxn funding record).
- Total raised: reported as $10 million by Tracxn and $11.8 million by Inc42 Datalabs across the two priced institutional rounds; the two trackers do not agree to the decimal, so both figures are given here.
- Latest valuation: not disclosed by the company or either investor at the time of the 2021 round, and no later valuation has been made public.
What each backer changed: Nexus Venture Partners’ 2018 cheque took Namaste Credit from a bootstrapped, channel-partner-led business to one that could fund a national partner network and pursue bank licensing deals at scale. Amicus Capital Partners, a growth-stage private equity investor rather than a venture fund, arrived in 2021 with a more operationally focused, profitability-oriented lens typical of PE-style backers, consistent with the company’s public emphasis from that period onward on the SaaS licensing line reaching breakeven.
How it makes money
- Marketplace fees: Namaste Credit earned success-based fees from banks and NBFCs when a loan sourced through LoanHub was actually disbursed, rather than charging borrowers directly (Entrepreneur India, October 2019).
- SaaS licensing: lenders paid an annual licence fee plus per-transaction charges to run iCAM, its underwriting and loan-origination software, inside their own operations (Entrepreneur India, October 2019).
- Margin split, as reported in 2019: the marketplace line was already profitable, while the newer SaaS licensing line was targeting breakeven within 6 to 12 months of that report (Entrepreneur India, October 2019). No later, updated split between the two lines has been publicly disclosed.
- Published take rate or fee schedule: not disclosed by the company; this figure is cut rather than estimated.
The part people get wrong is treating Namaste Credit as a lender. It never was. It carried no loans on its own balance sheet and took no credit risk; its revenue depended entirely on other institutions’ decisions to keep originating loans through its rails. That is a capital-light model when it works, and a fragile one when a handful of large bank relationships slow down, because there is no loan book of its own to fall back on.
The numbers
Full multi-year audited figures are not public. Inc42 Datalabs, which draws on statutory filings, discloses two consecutive fiscal years in detail; earlier years are not available from any source opened for this piece, so they are left out rather than estimated.
| Metric (₹ crore) | FY23 (year to March 2023) | FY24 (year to March 2024) |
| Revenue | 42.7 | 16.9 |
| Revenue growth YoY | +95.1% | -60.5% |
| Total expenses | Not disclosed | 29.7 (down 39% YoY) |
| Net profit/loss (PAT) | Not disclosed | -12.8 |
| Total assets | Not disclosed | 6.5 (down 69% YoY) |
Source for this table throughout: Inc42 Datalabs financial filing analysis of Namaste Credit, accessed September 2026.
Where the money comes from
- Product mix: LoanHub (marketplace success fees) and iCAM (SaaS licensing to lenders) were the two disclosed revenue lines as of the last public breakdown in 2019; no updated rupee split between them has been published (Entrepreneur India, October 2019).
- Distribution mix: as of the 2018 Series A raise, Namaste Credit routed volume through a network of more than 1,000 channel partners, which the company said converted 3 to 5 times more productively than typical industry partners (Inc42, April 2018).
- Lender network: over 80 financial institutions, including HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank and Axis Bank, were connected to the platform as of the 2019 reporting (Entrepreneur India, October 2019).
- Geography: headquartered and operating out of Bengaluru, with lending activity concentrated in the Indian domestic SME market; no disclosed international revenue.
The surprise sits in that distribution line. A company built on machine-learning underwriting and API connections to national banks still moved most of its loan volume through a human channel-partner network rather than pure digital acquisition, at least through 2018. The technology decided who qualified; people, more than 1,000 of them, still decided who applied.
The risks
- Volume concentration risk, realised: revenue nearly halved in one year, from ₹42.7 crore in FY23 to ₹16.9 crore in FY24, showing how directly the business depended on loan volumes it did not control (Inc42 Datalabs).
- Thin capital buffer: total assets fell 69% year-on-year to just ₹6.5 crore in FY24, against a ₹12.8 crore net loss the same year, leaving little cushion to absorb a further slowdown (Inc42 Datalabs).
- Balance-sheet-less model risk: because Namaste Credit never held loans itself, every rupee of revenue depended on discretionary decisions by partner banks and NBFCs to keep originating through its rails; when partners pulled back, there was no lending book of its own to soften the blow (Entrepreneur India, October 2019, on the fee-based model).
- Talent and client continuity risk, realised: in March 2025 the bulk of its team, around 100 people, and 15 of its clients moved to Decimal Technologies, the clearest sign that the standalone business could not be sustained on its own (CXOToday; CIO&Leader, March 2025).
The takeaway
Namaste Credit proved something real: an independent layer could get more than 80 competing banks to plug into shared underwriting rails, which is a genuine trust achievement in a market where lenders guard their credit models closely. But building the rails is not the same as owning the toll booth. A company that never carries a loan, never holds a deposit, and earns only when someone else decides to originate, is renting its revenue from partners who can walk away or renegotiate at any time. When Namaste Credit’s numbers turned in FY24, there was no proprietary loan book, no captive deposit base and no pricing power to fall back on, only the rails themselves, which is exactly what ended up moving to Decimal Technologies in 2025. The lesson for infrastructure-layer fintechs is not that the model is wrong; it is that pure infrastructure needs either scale that makes it indispensable or a second, owned revenue line, because thin-margin fee income on other people’s balance sheets shrinks exactly as fast as those balance sheets decide it should.
Frequently asked questions
What did Namaste Credit do?
It ran LoanHub, a marketplace matching Indian SMEs with more than 80 banks and NBFCs for working-capital and term loans, and iCAM, a digital underwriting platform it licensed to those same lenders (Entrepreneur India, October 2019).
Who founded Namaste Credit and when?
Gaurav Anand and Lucas Bianchi, both former Moody’s risk professionals, conceived the idea in 2014; Krishnan Parameswaran joined as co-founder and CTO in 2015, the year the company was incorporated in Bengaluru (Entrepreneur India, October 2019; Inc42 company profile).
How much funding did Namaste Credit raise?
It raised roughly $1 million from family and friends, a $3.8 million Series A from Nexus Venture Partners in April 2018, and an undisclosed pre-Series B led by Amicus Capital Partners around May 2021, for a reported total of $10 million (Tracxn) to $11.8 million (Inc42 Datalabs).
Was Namaste Credit profitable?
Not in its most recently disclosed fiscal year: FY24 revenue was ₹16.9 crore against a net loss of ₹12.8 crore, a reversal after FY23 revenue of ₹42.7 crore had grown 95.1% year-on-year (Inc42 Datalabs).
What happened to Namaste Credit in 2025?
In March 2025, Namaste Credit joined Decimal Technologies: 15 of its clients and around 100 of its employees moved onto Decimal’s platform and payroll, and the combined team opened a new Bangalore office (CXOToday; CIO&Leader, March 2025).
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Entrepreneur India, “How Namaste Credit is Solving India’s SME Lending Issue”, October 2019
- Inc42, “SME Lending Startup Namaste Credit Raises $3.8 Mn In Series A Funding”, April 2018
- Inc42 Datalabs, Namaste Credit company financial profile, accessed September 2026
- Inc42 Datalabs, Namaste Credit profit and loss detail, accessed September 2026
- Inc42, Namaste Credit company overview page, accessed September 2026
- Tracxn, Namaste Credit company profile (funding, revenue range, headcount), accessed September 2026
- Amicus Capital Partners, Namaste Credit portfolio page, accessed September 2026
- CXOToday, “Decimal Technologies & Namaste Credit Unite to Ignite the No-Code+AI Revolution”, March 2025
- CIO&Leader, “Decimal Technologies & Namaste Credit Unite to Ignite the No-Code+AI Revolution”, March 2025
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