Startup Deep Dive : Klub – India’s revenue-based-financing pioneer that pivoted to AI fundraising

In September 2022, a Bengaluru startup that was then barely three years old closed a ₹200 crore fund (about $21 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) built to do something Indian venture capital rarely did: hand growth money to consumer brands without taking a slice of their equity. The company was Klub, and across the trade press it was routinely described as India’s leading revenue-based-financing platform, backed by Peak XV’s Surge accelerator (the former Sequoia India) and armed with one of the largest seed rounds an Indian startup had raised.

Barely two years later, in November 2024, the same company halved its workforce, as reported by Mint. By 2026 its main website, klubworks.com, redirected to klub.ai and no longer led with revenue-based financing at all; it led with an AI fundraising tool called RaiseOS. This is the story of how a well-funded, well-connected fintech built an entire model around a financing product that was fashionable in 2021 — and then had to rebuild itself when the model, and the market, moved.

Quick facts

What Klub does

Klub is a revenue-based-financing (RBF) platform founded in 2019 in Bengaluru. Its core promise, as it described the product to Entrackr in 2021, was growth capital of ₹2 lakh to ₹30 crore for digital-first businesses — e-commerce, direct-to-consumer, edtech and SaaS brands — with, in the company’s words, zero equity dilution and no personal guarantees. Instead of buying shares or demanding fixed EMIs, Klub advanced money and took repayments as a share of the brand’s future revenue, so the payback flexed up in good months and down in slow ones. It positioned itself as a marketplace: matching capital from banks, NBFCs and individual investors with vetted consumer brands, rather than lending only off its own balance sheet. By 2025–26 that positioning had shifted again, with the company presenting RaiseOS, an AI tool to help founders plan and run a fundraise across equity, debt and RBF, as its headline product on klub.ai.

The origin

Klub was started by two people who had spent their careers on the investing side of the table. Anurakt Jain, the co-founder and CEO, had been an intrapreneur at InMobi — part of the team behind Glance and TruFactor — and before that a venture capitalist at DFJ and Vertex; he is an IIT Delhi graduate with an MBA from Wharton and a CFA charter, per his company and investor profiles. His co-founder Ishita Verma, the COO, came from an investment background and studied at an Indian Institute of Management. The pair have said they built Klub after seeing, from inside the funding world, that the one-size-fits-all choice between equity and traditional debt did not fit every business.

The founding insight was specific to a certain kind of company: a consumer brand with real, recurring sales but not the profile a bank wants to underwrite, and not always the venture-scale trajectory that justifies giving away equity. For a Diwali inventory build-up or a marketing push, such a brand does not need to sell shares; it needs cash it can repay out of the sales that cash generates. Revenue-based financing was Klub’s answer — money priced to the rhythm of a brand’s own revenue. It was an idea imported from Western fintech, and Klub was among the first to press it hard in the Indian consumer-brand market.

The struggle years

Klub’s difficulty was less a slow start than a fast one into a hard market. The company launched its model just as capital was cheap and consumer brands were multiplying, and it scaled quickly — it told Financial IT in December 2021 that it had grown 18x over the previous year and had more than 200,000 SMEs on its platforms. But revenue-based financing in India ran into two structural problems at once. The cost of capital rose sharply from 2022 as interest rates climbed, which squeezed the arbitrage at the heart of RBF; and the model itself depended on funding fast-growing, often unprofitable consumer brands precisely as that category fell out of favour with investors and lenders.

The strain became public in two ways. First, Klub looked abroad for growth it could no longer find as easily at home, announcing in February 2024 a move into the Middle East (more on that below). Second, and more bluntly, it cut staff: in November 2024, Mint reported that Klub had halved its workforce. For a company that had been held up as the front-runner of an entire financing category, a workforce cut of that scale was the clearest signal that the 2021 version of the business was not going to carry it. By late 2025, tracker data put its headcount at about 86 (CB Insights, as of December 2025) — a fraction of a fully staffed growth-stage fintech.

The turning point

The turning point is best read as a pivot rather than a single triumphant event, and it runs in two directions. The first was geographic and regulatory. On 6 February 2024, Klub announced it had become, in its telling, the first revenue-based-financing player to secure a credit fund licence in the Abu Dhabi Global Market — a Category 3C permission from the ADGM’s Financial Services Regulatory Authority to manage private credit funds — and said it aimed to invest AED 1 billion (about $272 million at the dirham’s peg of roughly AED 3.67 to the dollar) in the region. It was an attempt to take a proven Indian playbook to a market with deeper pools of patient capital.

The second, and more decisive, turn was the product itself. By 2025–26 the company had moved its centre of gravity from being a financier to being software: klubworks.com now redirects to klub.ai, whose headline offer is RaiseOS, described as a way to keep a fundraise organised — deciding what to raise, managing investor conversations and closing — across equity, debt and revenue-based routes. The numbers on either side of this shift tell the story: a company that in 2022 was deploying a ₹200 crore fund into brands had, by 2024, halved its team, and by 2026 was leading with an AI tool rather than a cheque. The pivot is the event.

The money behind it

Klub raised early, raised loudly, and then went quiet. The shape of its funding:

• Pre-seed — $2 million: backed by AngelList, Better Capital, EMVC Fintech Fund and Tracxn Labs, alongside angels including Naveen Tewari, Kunal Shah, Ramakant Sharma, Rajesh Yabaji, Sachin Maheshwari and Shradha Sharma (Entrackr, August 2021).
• Seed — $20 million, August 2021: split as $10 million equity and $10 million debt, from 9Unicorns, Sequoia’s Surge, Alter Global and GMO VenturePartners; described at the time as one of the largest seed rounds raised by an Indian startup (Entrackr and Inc42, August 2021). Klub had earlier been part of the second cohort of Sequoia’s Surge accelerator.
• Debt line — Northern Arc Capital, December 2021: a debt raise to scale its embedded-financing offering for e-commerce merchants; the exact size was not disclosed in the announcement (Financial IT, December 2021).
• Fund vehicles, not just company equity: Klub’s ₹200 crore SEBI-registered Category II Alternative Investment Fund (final close 5 September 2022) and a later maiden ADGM credit fund in the UAE are pools it manages to deploy into brands, distinct from the equity it raised for itself.
• Total raised (contested): trackers differ — Inc42’s company profile puts it at about $24.7 million, while CB Insights lists about $26.2 million. Klub has not publicly disclosed a valuation.

How it makes money

Revenue-based financing is a spread-and-fee business, and Klub layered a marketplace on top of it. The mechanics, as the company has described them:

• The core product: Klub advanced growth capital — originally ₹2 lakh to ₹30 crore — and was repaid as a percentage of the brand’s revenue over a defined term, which its ₹200 crore fund set at around two years per investment (BusinessWire India / ANI, May 2022).
• Where the margin sits: the earnings come from the difference between the cost of the capital Klub sources (from investors, banks and NBFCs) and the total repayment a brand makes — a fee or premium on the advance — plus platform and management economics on the funds it runs.
• A marketplace, not just a lender: Klub described itself as connecting institutional capital (banks, NBFCs) and individual investors with consumer brands, which lets it originate more volume than its own balance sheet would allow and earn on matching capital to demand.
• Fund management: running SEBI- and ADGM-registered funds adds a managed-money layer, where economics come from deploying and managing third-party capital rather than only from Klub’s own book.
• The part people get wrong: RBF is not a fixed-interest loan. Because repayment tracks revenue, the provider carries real exposure to a brand’s sales slowing — the flexibility that makes it attractive to founders is exactly what makes the lender’s yield uncertain, and that uncertainty is unforgiving when the cost of capital rises.

The numbers

A candid note on the numbers: Klub is a private company, and unlike many peers its audited annual revenue and profit-or-loss are not carried in the major Indian startup financial trackers as of September 2026, so this piece does not state a revenue or profit figure it cannot verify. What can be traced to dated, sourced disclosures is Klub’s funding, its fund vehicles and its deployment activity. The verifiable record, unit as marked:

The cumulative India figure is company-stated and given in dirhams in Klub’s own announcement: AED 400 million is roughly $109 million at the dirham peg. Where the company quotes AED, it is Klub’s own framing for a group that by 2024 spanned India and the UAE.

Where the money comes from

Klub’s deployment tells you what it actually financed — and where the surprise is. The split by activity and geography, from dated disclosures:

• Consumer and D2C brands were the core: the ₹200 crore fund’s named portfolio included BluSmart, Ben Franklin, Bewakoof, Furlenco, SMOOR Chocolates and The New Shop — a spread across mobility, apparel, furniture, food and retail (ANI / BusinessWire India, May 2022).
• E-commerce sellers, timed to the calendar: a chunk of deployment was working capital for merchants selling on Amazon and Flipkart, including ₹100 crore around the 2023 festive season (company-stated) — RBF is naturally seasonal, following inventory and marketing cycles.
• Adjacent sectors: beyond D2C, Klub said it extended into edtech and SaaS, widening the base of businesses whose revenue it could underwrite (Entrackr, 2021).
• The geographic surprise: by February 2024 the growth story had partly moved offshore — an ADGM-licensed credit fund and an AED 1 billion ambition in the Middle East, a striking pivot for a company built on the Indian consumer-brand boom (PR Newswire, February 2024).

The risks

Klub’s risks are the risks of the RBF model itself, and its recent history shows several of them turning real:

• Cost-of-capital squeeze: RBF earns a spread between the money it sources and the money brands repay. When benchmark rates rose from 2022, that spread narrowed, and a model built in a low-rate era became harder to run profitably. This is structural, not company-specific.
• Concentration in a category that cooled: Klub’s book was tied to fast-growing consumer and D2C brands. When funding for that category tightened, both the demand for growth capital and the credit quality of borrowers were exposed at the same time — the mechanism visible behind the 2024 workforce cut reported by Mint.
• Regulatory and disclosure risk: RBF sits in a lightly defined space between lending and investing, and Indian digital-lending rules have tightened. Operating SEBI-registered AIFs in India and an ADGM-regulated fund abroad means Klub answers to more than one regulator, each of which can reshape what the product may look like.
• Pivot execution risk: moving from being a financier to selling RaiseOS software is a different business with different economics and buyers. The transition explains the shrunken headcount, and its success is not yet established in public disclosures as of September 2026.

The takeaway

The transferable lesson from Klub is about the difference between a product that fits a moment and a business that survives past it. Revenue-based financing was well suited to 2021: cheap capital, a flood of consumer brands, and founders keen to avoid dilution. Klub read that moment early, raised aggressively, and became the name most associated with the category in India. But a financing product whose economics depend on cheap money and fast-growing borrowers is fragile when both of those conditions reverse at once, and no amount of early lead insulates you from that. What Klub did next — cutting hard, extending into a new regulatory geography, and rebuilding around software rather than a balance sheet — is the more instructive part. The pivot may or may not work, but the willingness to admit that the original model had run its course, rather than defend it, is the move worth studying.

Frequently asked questions

What is Klub and what does it do?

Klub is a Bengaluru fintech founded in 2019 that pioneered revenue-based financing in India — advancing growth capital to consumer and digital brands and taking repayment as a share of their revenue, rather than equity or fixed EMIs. By 2025–26 it had shifted its headline offering to RaiseOS, an AI platform for planning and running fundraises across equity, debt and RBF.

Who founded Klub?

Klub was co-founded by Anurakt Jain (CEO), a former venture capitalist at DFJ and Vertex and an InMobi intrapreneur with an IIT Delhi degree and a Wharton MBA, and Ishita Verma (COO), who came from an investment background and studied at an Indian Institute of Management.

How much funding has Klub raised?

Klub raised a $2 million pre-seed and then a $20 million seed round in August 2021 (split $10 million equity and $10 million debt), backed by 9Unicorns, Sequoia’s Surge, Alter Global and GMO VenturePartners, plus a debt line from Northern Arc. Trackers put total funding at about $24.7 million (Inc42) to $26.2 million (CB Insights); no valuation has been publicly disclosed.

Did Klub shut down or pivot?

Klub has not been reported as shut down. It halved its workforce in November 2024 (Mint) and, by 2026, its site klubworks.com redirected to klub.ai, leading with the RaiseOS fundraising software rather than revenue-based financing — a clear pivot away from its original model.

Is revenue-based financing risky for the lender?

It can be. Because repayments track a brand’s revenue, the provider carries the risk of that revenue slowing, and the spread it earns is squeezed when the cost of capital rises — both of which pressured RBF businesses in India from 2022 onward.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics); dirham figures use the UAE peg of roughly AED 3.67 to the dollar.

• Entrackr — Klub raises $20 million seed round (August 2021)
• Inc42 — Klub raises $20 Mn seed round; Klub company/funding profile (August 2021; 2026)
• Business Insider India — Klub raises $20 million in seed round (August 2021)
• YourStory — Klub growth plans and company profile (September 2021)
• Financial IT — Klub raises funds from Northern Arc Capital (December 2021)
• ANI News — Klub’s ₹200 crore RBF fund backs 15 growth-stage companies in 3 months (May 2022)
• BusinessWire India — Klub’s ₹200 crore RBF fund, portfolio and terms (May 2022)
• Equitypandit / Klub blog — final close of ₹200 crore maiden fund (September 2022)
• PR Newswire — Klub secures ADGM credit fund licence, AED 1 billion Middle East plan (February 2024)
• Mint — Fintech startup Klub halves workforce (November 2024)
• CB Insights — Klub company profile, headcount and total funding (2025–2026)
• Tracxn — Klub company and legal-entity profiles (2026)
• PitchBook / ADGM public register — Klub Capital Technologies Limited entity details (2026)
• klub.ai / klubworks.com — RaiseOS product positioning (2026)

Found an error? Write to us and we’ll correct it in the open, dated, on the piece.