Startup Deep Dive : Ftcash — the merchant lender whose revenue fell 11.4% the year it won its second RBI licence

ftcash has put more than ₹600 crore of loans into the hands of Indian shopkeepers, by its own count in November 2022, yet the company behind it booked revenue of only ₹32.7 crore in FY25, and that number was 11.4% lower than the year before. The decline landed in the very year the Mumbai lender finally held both of the Reserve Bank of India permissions it had spent a decade chasing: a non-banking financial company licence and, from 4 March 2025, a final authorisation to run as an online payment aggregator.

That is the puzzle at the centre of this piece. A merchant-lending startup that began as a payments app in June 2015, that raised a ₹50 crore Series A from Accion and the Dutch development bank FMO in May 2019, that told The Hindu in March 2023 it would take assets under management from ₹360 crore to ₹1,000 crore in a year, and that then shrank its top line and, on Tracxn’s count, roughly 30% of its headcount. This is what the public record says about how ftcash got here, what it earns, and where the pressure sits.

Quick facts

What they do

ftcash lends to micro-merchants and small businesses, the pharmacies, garment shops, auto-parts stores and kirana counters that sit below the ticket size most banks care about, and it collects repayments in small daily slices, called equated daily instalments, through the same card and UPI acceptance rails it gives those merchants. As of Inc42’s March 2025 report, secured loans go up to ₹50 lakh and unsecured credit up to ₹25 lakh. Around the loans sits a payments layer: POS devices, UPI acceptance launched with ICICI Bank in 2016, and, since 4 March 2025, a full RBI authorisation to act as an online payment aggregator. The customer is the same in both halves of the business. The payments data is the underwriting file, and the payments flow is the collections mechanism.

The origin

The founding story is small and domestic, which is fitting for a company that lends to newspaper vendors. In an August 2015 YourStory profile, Sanjeev Chandak described a vendor who had to send someone round to his flat to collect payment because nobody at home carried cash. In TechCrunch’s December 2017 account, it is co-founder Vaibhav Lodha’s newspaper man, whose cashflow problems were bad enough that loan sharks were the fallback. Either way, the insight was that the person selling you milk could not accept electronic money, and because of that could not prove income, and because of that could not borrow.

The team was unusually senior for a 2015 fintech. Chandak, an IIT Kharagpur and Wharton graduate, had been Deputy CFO of Deutsche Bank India, per YourStory. Deepak Kothari came from Grant Thornton and financial services consulting. Lodha, per several profiles, had worked at the World Bank. The corporate shell, Nomisma Mobile Solutions Private Limited, had been incorporated in Kolkata on 14 August 2014, according to Tofler, and the product launched in Mumbai in mid-June 2015 as a mobile platform that let offline retailers accept payments, advertise and reward customers in under five minutes of set-up. At that point the company had a little over 150 merchants and told YourStory it hoped for 2,000 by March 2016. The pitch to merchants was zero upfront cost and no monthly rental; ftcash took a cut per transaction. Loans were the plan from the start, but they were not yet the product.

The struggle years

The first three years were a payments business trying to become a lender, and the public record shows how thin that bridge was. By June 2017, when ftcash announced an undisclosed pre-Series A from IvyCap Ventures and 500 Startups, BW Disrupt reported the company was growing 30–40% month-on-month and set two targets: scale annual transactions to ₹1,500 crore and disburse loans of ₹150 crore or more, while expanding in Mumbai, Surat, Jaipur and Pune. By December 2017, TechCrunch counted 25,000 merchants, with 30% month-on-month growth sustained over 18 months, but also noted that once signed up, ftcash processed only between 10% and 50% of a merchant’s purchases. A collections model that depends on payment flow is only as strong as the share of flow it sees. The same piece had the founders talking about Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. No overseas operation has ever been reported since.

Money was the second constraint. Loans in 2017 ran from roughly $1,000 to $20,000 at 18–30% interest, per TechCrunch, funded through an undisclosed financial partner rather than ftcash’s own balance sheet. FMO’s project disclosure, published on 21 November 2018 and effective 8 April 2019, described the model plainly: a merchant cash advance business, underwriting on digital payments data, collecting from card transactions, operating as a financial services distributor with an off-balance-sheet partnership model. FMO’s stated purpose for its ₹13.89 crore commitment was telling too: to support loan growth, to build an institutional framework, and to hire a management team to handle volumes. Those are the things a development bank writes when it sees a small company with a good idea and not yet the organisation to carry it.

Then came a long quiet stretch. After the ₹50 crore Series A in May 2019, the next equity Tracxn records is a $2.7 million tranche in May 2022. In between sat the pandemic, which hit precisely the kind of cash-and-carry merchants ftcash lends to. The company has said little in public about that period beyond a line in a November 2022 IBS Intelligence interview that assets under management grew 22 times since 2019 “despite Covid-19” and that the book grew more than three times in 2021. A company that grows 22x from a small base while raising almost no equity is a company leaning hard on partner capital, and the June 2017 target of ₹150 crore in loans compares with a cumulative ₹600 crore disbursed by November 2022, seven years after launch. There is one more small signal of a stretched organisation: ftcash joined the UN Global Compact on 16 July 2019 and was later delisted for being non-responsive, with its last communication on progress due on 5 August 2024, according to the Compact’s participant record.

The turning point

The single event that changed the shape of the business was the RBI’s grant of an NBFC licence to Ftcash Finance Private Limited, announced on 8 November 2022. The subsidiary had been incorporated for that purpose on 4 December 2019, per Tofler, so the wait was almost three years. On the day of the announcement, Inc42 reported the numbers on the “before” side: about 60,000 merchants, ₹600 crore disbursed cumulatively since 2015, roughly 300 employees across eight states, and a stated target of just ₹100 crore of disbursals in FY23. Chandak’s framing was that the licence would let the company lend with minimal documentation and daily repayment, on its own book, instead of purely originating for partners such as Northern Arc, UGRO Capital and Ambit.

The “after” side is in the filings. FY23, the year the licence arrived, closed with revenue of ₹27.81 crore and a loss of ₹9.69 crore, per TheKredible’s reading of the accounts. FY24, the first full year as a licensed lender, took revenue to ₹36.91 crore, up 32.7%, while the loss narrowed to ₹6.22 crore. TheKredible put the EBITDA margin at minus 8.2% in FY24 against minus 35.7% in FY23. By 30 March 2023 the company was telling The Hindu its AUM stood at ₹360 crore and would reach ₹1,000 crore by March 2024, with growth to come from western and southern India in three categories: hardware and electricals, health and wellness, and apparel. Debt followed the licence: Tofler’s charge register shows ₹9 crore borrowed from Caspian Impact Investments across March and September 2023 and ₹3 crore from AU Small Finance Bank across June and September 2023. The licence turned a distributor into a lender, and for one year the economics moved the right way.

The money behind it

ftcash has never raised a large round. Its funding history is a series of modest cheques from a stable cast, and the total is disputed between databases. The rounds that are documented:

• 2015–2016: PayPal incubation and Mastercard Start Path (one of six teams selected globally, per YourStory, May 2019). IvyCap Ventures first invested at seed stage; CB Insights dates its first participation to March 2016.
• 6 June 2017: pre-Series A of undisclosed size from IvyCap Ventures and 500 Startups (BW Disrupt).
• 21 November 2018 (effective 8 April 2019): FMO commits ₹13.89 crore from its MASSIF fund to support loan growth and hire a management team (FMO project disclosure).
• 2 May 2019: ₹50 crore Series A led by Accion and FMO, with existing investor IvyCap Ventures participating; CB Insights records a $15 million post-money valuation (YourStory; Accion; CB Insights).
• July 2019: Facebook India Innovation Hub programme (CB Insights).
• May 2022: about $2.7 million, with FMO named (Tracxn).
• July 2024: about $3.9 million, recorded by Tracxn as a Series A extension; no press announcement was located, so treat this as reported rather than confirmed.

Total raised depends on who is counting: ftcash itself said $10.2 million in November 2022; PitchBook shows $9.9 million; CB Insights shows $7.36 million; Tracxn, which includes the 2024 tranche, shows $16.1 million. What each backer changed:

• IvyCap Ventures supplied continuity. Founder Vikram Gupta sits on the Nomisma board as a nominee director, per Tofler, and the firm has been in every documented round from 2016 to 2024.
• FMO brought development-finance discipline and a long-dated cheque; its 2018 disclosure explicitly funded management hiring and an “institutional framework”.
• Accion, a global inclusion-focused nonprofit investor, led the 2019 round and lent the company its credentials with impact lenders; the Caspian Impact Investments debt of 2023 sits in that same ecosystem.

How it makes money

The model has three layers, and the part people get wrong is assuming the payments business is where the money is. It is not; it is where the data and the collections are.

• Interest and fees on loans. Secured loans up to ₹50 lakh and unsecured credit up to ₹25 lakh (Inc42, March 2025). In 2017 TechCrunch quoted 18–30% interest on loans of $1,000–$20,000, positioned against informal lenders charging 50–300%. Current rate cards are not published in the sources reviewed.
• Daily collections through the payments rail. Repayment is by equated daily instalment, deducted from card and UPI receipts on ftcash’s POS, as described at the 2019 Series A and again at the 2022 NBFC announcement. This is the mechanism that lets a lender price a kirana store without collateral.
• Origination for partners. Before 2022 the book sat almost entirely with partners; FMO called it an off-balance-sheet distribution model. Northern Arc, UGRO Capital and Ambit were named as credit partners in November 2022. Since the NBFC licence, part of the book sits on Ftcash Finance’s own balance sheet, funded by debt from Caspian and AU Small Finance Bank.
• Payment acceptance. POS devices and, since March 2025, a licensed online payment aggregation business. Pricing (device rental, MDR) is not disclosed in the sources reviewed.

Costs out: employee costs across eight states of feet-on-street acquisition and collections, finance costs on borrowed money, and credit losses. On credit quality the only published figure is company-stated: 90-day-plus delinquency below 4% as of November 2022, per IBS Intelligence, which the company said was better than the segment norm. The margin, when it comes, sits in the spread between the cost of partner or borrowed capital and the yields the daily-repayment model can sustain. FY24’s EBITDA margin of minus 8.2% shows that spread was close to covering operating costs; FY25’s revenue drop shows how quickly it can move the other way.

The numbers

All figures for Nomisma Mobile Solutions Private Limited, the operating entity, in ₹ crore, as reported by TheKredible (FY23, FY24) and Inc42’s financials tracker (FY24, FY25). The two trackers agree on FY24 revenue.

Three things stand out:

• The loss has narrowed every year, from ₹9.69 crore to ₹6.22 crore to ₹3.8 crore, but FY25’s improvement came from cutting cost, not growing revenue.
• Inc42’s FY25 expense figure of ₹27.4 crore does not reconcile with TheKredible’s FY24 total of ₹42.76 crore on a like-for-like basis, so the two trackers are almost certainly using different expense definitions; the direction (down sharply) is consistent, the magnitude is not.
• Headcount moved with the cost line. Tracxn’s estimates show about 571 employees in June 2024 and 400 in June 2025, a fall of roughly 30%; the company had said “around 300” in November 2022. Its legal-entity page showed 172 in May 2026. These are third-party estimates, not filings.

Two further points of scale for context. Ftcash Finance, the NBFC, has paid-up capital of ₹6.35 crore, per Tofler, which is small relative to a stated AUM of ₹360 crore in March 2023, and consistent with most of the book still being partner-funded. And FY25 revenue of ₹32.7 crore is about $3.4 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0, which for a company that has raised somewhere between $10 million and $16 million of equity over a decade is a sobering ratio.

Where the money comes from

ftcash does not publish a revenue split by product or geography. What the record does give is the shape of the book:

• By product: secured MSME loans (up to ₹50 lakh) and unsecured credit (up to ₹25 lakh), plus POS devices and payment aggregation (Inc42, March 2025; Inc42, November 2022).
• By merchant category: retailers, pharmacies, garment stores, automobile shops and mom-and-pop stores were the named segments in 2022; the 2023 growth push targeted hardware and electricals, health and wellness, and apparel (The Hindu, 30 March 2023).
• By geography: eight states as of November 2022 (Inc42); the original expansion cities in 2017 were Mumbai, Surat, Jaipur and Pune (BW Disrupt); the 2023 plan was weighted to western and southern India (The Hindu).
• By balance sheet: originated-for-partners (Northern Arc, UGRO Capital, Ambit) versus own-book through Ftcash Finance since late 2022. The split is not disclosed.

The surprise is how little of the ₹360 crore AUM ftcash quoted in March 2023 can have been on its own balance sheet at that point. With an NBFC subsidiary carrying ₹6.35 crore of paid-up capital and total group assets of ₹37.2 crore even at the end of FY25, the arithmetic says the large majority of loans outstanding were funded by partners, with ftcash earning an origination and servicing margin rather than the full interest spread. That is not a criticism, it is the model FMO described in 2018, but it explains why AUM can grow 22 times while revenue stays under ₹40 crore. The second surprise is the registered office: the company that defines itself as a Mumbai fintech is, on paper, a West Bengal company with its registered office in Kolkata, per Tofler.

The risks

• Growth has stalled, and the ₹1,000 crore target has gone quiet. In March 2023 the company set an AUM target of ₹1,000 crore by March 2024. No public update confirming that number was located in this research, and the revenue line then fell 11.4% in FY25 while headcount dropped by around 30% on Tracxn’s estimates. The mechanism is simple: a lender that originates for partners earns fees on flow, and when flow slows, revenue falls faster than a balance-sheet lender’s would. The counter-move, the March 2025 payment aggregator authorisation, adds a new fee stream but also a new compliance load, in a category where RBI issued fresh regulations on 15 September 2025.
• Thin equity under a partner-funded book. Somewhere between $7 million and $16 million of equity in ten years, depending on the database, and an NBFC with ₹6.35 crore of paid-up capital. Partner lines from Northern Arc, UGRO Capital, Ambit, Caspian and AU Small Finance Bank are the real funding base. If any of those reprices or pauses, ftcash cannot easily replace it from its own balance sheet, and the company said in November 2022 it planned to raise again in 2023; the only equity Tracxn records since is about $3.9 million in July 2024, unannounced.
• Collections depend on merchants routing payments through ftcash. The daily-instalment model works because repayments come off card and UPI receipts on ftcash’s rails. TechCrunch noted as early as 2017 that ftcash saw only 10–50% of a merchant’s purchases. In a market where UPI acceptance is free and everywhere, a merchant under stress can move flow to another QR code. The company’s stated 90-day-plus delinquency of under 4% dates from November 2022 and has not been updated in public; it is company-stated, not audited or disclosed under a listing regime.

The takeaway

The transferable lesson from ftcash is about the difference between a wedge and a business. Payments acceptance was a brilliant wedge: it got a former Deutsche Bank CFO into 60,000 shops, it produced the data to underwrite people no bank would touch, and it built a collections mechanism that did not need a recovery agent. But a wedge earns wedge economics. For seven years the company distributed other people’s capital and booked a fee, which is why it could grow its book 22 times and still report ₹27.81 crore of revenue. The NBFC licence in November 2022 was the moment it tried to convert the wedge into a lender, and for one year, FY24, the numbers improved sharply. The lesson is not that ftcash was wrong to start with payments. It is that the conversion from distributor to principal has to be funded, and if the equity to do it never arrives, the licence you waited three years for becomes a cost centre rather than a moat. Founders building on a data-and-collections wedge should ask early what it will take to own the asset, not just originate it, and raise for that before the wedge stops growing.

Frequently asked questions

Who owns ftcash and is it an NBFC?

ftcash is a brand of Nomisma Mobile Solutions Private Limited, a private company incorporated in Kolkata on 14 August 2014, per Tofler. Its lending subsidiary, Ftcash Finance Private Limited, received an RBI NBFC licence announced on 8 November 2022, and the group received final RBI authorisation as an online payment aggregator on 4 March 2025, per Inc42.

Who founded ftcash and what did they do before?

Sanjeev Chandak (CEO), previously Deputy CFO of Deutsche Bank India and an IIT Kharagpur and Wharton alumnus; Deepak Kothari, previously at Grant Thornton; and Vaibhav Lodha, now Chief Business Officer, previously at the World Bank according to several profiles. The product launched in Mumbai in June 2015.

How much money has ftcash raised?

It depends on the database. The company said $10.2 million as of November 2022; PitchBook shows $9.9 million; CB Insights $7.36 million; Tracxn $16.1 million including a reported $3.9 million tranche in July 2024. The largest disclosed round is the ₹50 crore Series A of May 2019 led by Accion and FMO with IvyCap Ventures, at a reported $15 million post-money valuation.

Is ftcash profitable?

No. It reported a net loss of ₹3.8 crore on revenue of ₹32.7 crore in FY25, per Inc42’s financials tracker, after losses of ₹6.22 crore in FY24 and ₹9.69 crore in FY23, per TheKredible. Losses have narrowed each year, but FY25 revenue fell 11.4%.

How do ftcash loans work?

Merchants get secured loans up to ₹50 lakh or unsecured credit up to ₹25 lakh, underwritten on their digital payments data, and repay in equated daily instalments deducted from card and UPI receipts on ftcash’s payments platform. Loans have historically been funded by partners such as Northern Arc, UGRO Capital and Ambit, and since late 2022 partly by Ftcash Finance’s own balance sheet.

Sources

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

• Inc42, company financials page for Ftcash (Nomisma Mobile Solutions Private Limited), FY25 revenue, expenses, loss, assets, September 2026
• TheKredible, “Ftcash reports 32% revenue growth in FY24, along with improved EBITDA margin”, FY23 and FY24 revenue, loss, expenses and margins, 2024 (accessed via search extract; page offline at time of writing)
• Inc42, “ftcash gets final RBI nod to operate as online payment aggregator”, 10 March 2025
• Inc42, “Microlending startup ftcash receives NBFC licence from RBI”, 8 November 2022
• YourStory, “ftcash gets NBFC licence from RBI, aims to disburse Rs 100 Cr in FY23 to MSMEs”, 8 November 2022
• Zee Business, “Lending startup ftcash gets NBFC licence from RBI”, 9 November 2022
• IBS Intelligence, “Empowering micro-merchants: interview with Sanjeev Chandak, Cofounder and CEO, ftcash”, 16 November 2022
• The Hindu, “MSME fintech lender ftcash eyes AUM of ₹1,000 crore in FY24”, 30 March 2023
• YourStory, “Mumbai-based fintech startup ftcash raises Rs 50 Cr from Accion, FMO, and IvyCap Ventures”, 2 May 2019
• Accion, “Ftcash raises Rs 50 Cr funding from Accion, FMO and IvyCap Ventures”, 3 May 2019
• FinDev Gateway, “ftcash raises 50 crores from Accion, FMO and IvyCap Ventures”, May 2019
• FMO, project disclosure for Nomisma Mobile Solutions Pvt. Ltd. (FtCash), INR 138.94 million, published 21 November 2018, effective 8 April 2019
• BW Disrupt, “ftcash raises pre-Series A funding from IvyCap Ventures and 500 Startups”, 6 June 2017
• TechCrunch, “ftcash helps Indian businesses accept cashless payments and loans them money”, 4 December 2017
• YourStory, “Ex-CFO of Deutsche Bank India starts a mobile platform for cashless transactions”, 6 August 2015
• Tofler, company pages for Nomisma Mobile Solutions Private Limited (CIN U74900WB2014PTC203082) and Ftcash Finance Private Limited (CIN U67110MH2019PTC333955), accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, ftcash company profile and funding rounds, employee estimates as of June 2024 and June 2025, accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, legal-entity page for Nomisma Mobile Solutions Private Limited, employee estimate May 2026 and registered charges, accessed September 2026
• CB Insights, FtCash company profile and financials (Series A valuation, investor list, March 2025 payment aggregator note), accessed September 2026
• PitchBook, Ftcash company profile (total raised, employee count), accessed September 2026
• UN Global Compact, participant record for Nomisma Mobile Solutions Private Limited (ftcash), joined 16 July 2019, delisted as non-responsive, accessed September 2026
• ftcash.com, awards page and privacy policy (operating entity name), accessed September 2026
• Reserve Bank of India, press release on the Regulation of Payment Aggregators Directions, 15 September 2025

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