Startup Deep Dive : Open Financial Technologies — how India’s 100th unicorn earns just Rs 46 crore

In May 2022 Open Financial Technologies became India’s 100th unicorn, valued at more than $1 billion after a $50 million round led by IIFL Finance. In the same year its audited operating revenue was about ₹30 crore, and it had spent close to ₹297 crore to earn it.

That gap between a billion-dollar price tag and a business earning less than the cost of a modest office building is the whole story of Open. It is Bengaluru’s connected-banking platform for small businesses, a company that convinced Google, Tiger Global and Temasek that plumbing between founders and their banks could be worth a fortune, and then spent the next three years trying to make the plumbing pay for itself. This piece walks through the numbers, the pivots and the still-open question underneath the valuation.

Quick facts

What Open does

Open sells a business bank account that behaves like software. A small company signs up, connects the account, and gets collections, payouts, automatic reconciliation, expense management and bookkeeping in one dashboard, sitting on top of a partner bank rather than a licence Open holds itself. Open does not have a banking licence; it is a technology layer over regulated banks such as ICICI Bank, State Bank of India and Axis Bank (as described by ORF and TechCrunch). The pitch is time: Open has said business owners save roughly two hours a day on financial admin.

• Core product: a connected business current account for SMEs and startups, bundling payments in, payouts, auto-reconciliation and accounting.
• Zwitch: an embedded-finance and banking-as-a-service layer that lets other companies plug banking features into their own apps via APIs.
• BankingStack: enterprise banking software sold to banks and larger institutions.
• Company-stated scale (attribute with care): more than 3.5 million businesses on the platform and over $30 billion in annualised transactions, up from 500,000 SMEs and about $14 billion annualised in November 2020 (company figures via ORF and PYMNTS).

The founding insight

The four founders started from a grievance they had lived. Large corporates get relationship managers, transaction-banking desks and cash-management tools; a two-person startup gets a branch queue and a spreadsheet. “Business banking was broken for small businesses,” co-founders Deena Jacob and Mabel Chacko put it to ORF, arguing that the privileges enjoyed by large enterprises were simply out of reach for everyone else.

The team knew the terrain. Anish Achuthan had built the NFC payments venture Neartivity Wireless in 2009 and co-founded Zwitch in 2013, a developer-focused payments platform later acquired by Citrus Payments in 2015; he then worked inside PayU. Mabel Chacko, his wife and co-founder, and Ajeesh Achuthan came from the same payments world, and Deena Jacob brought a finance background. So when they launched Open in 2017, the insight was not that small businesses needed a bank, but that they needed the layer above the bank: the software that turns a raw account into a workflow. For its first three years the company deliberately chased platform depth over revenue, wiring payables to banks and to more than 300 ERP systems before it worried about a price list.

The struggle years

Open’s difficulties are not a footnote to the growth story; they are the growth story. Three of them are documented and dated.

• The accounting reset (FY22). When Open moved to Indian Accounting Standards (IND AS), its reported FY22 numbers were restated hard: revenue was cut from about ₹41 crore to ₹24 crore, and losses were widened from about ₹168 crore to ₹249 crore for the same year (Inc42). Overnight, the business looked smaller and lossier than its own earlier books suggested.
• The layoffs (April 2023). Open cut about 47 employees, framed as performance-based, and its founders took a 50% pay cut, citing a push toward scale and profitability (Entrackr, Inc42, HRKatha). This came less than a year after the unicorn headline.
• Revenue going backwards (FY24). Operating revenue actually fell about 17%, from ₹29.9 crore in FY23 to ₹24.8 crore in FY24 (Entrackr, Inc42) — a rare and uncomfortable thing for a company valued in ten figures.

Underneath all three sat the same pressure: heavy, persistent losses. By the end of FY25 Open’s accumulated losses had reached ₹1,921 crore (about $200 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0), a figure that dwarfs everything the company has ever earned from operations.

The turning point

The pivot is best read as the distance between two financial years. In FY23, Open spent about ₹297 crore to produce roughly ₹30 crore of operating revenue — the high-water mark of growth-at-any-cost, and the year net losses sat at ₹242 crore (Inc42). That model did not survive the funding winter. After the 2023 layoffs and pay cuts, the company stopped spending its way to scale and started defending its margin.

The result showed up in FY25. Operating revenue rose about 85%, from ₹24.8 crore to roughly ₹46 crore; total expenses fell about 17%, from around ₹192 crore to ₹158 crore; and the net loss shrank about 36%, from roughly ₹169 crore to about ₹109 crore (Inc42, Entrackr). The EBITDA loss narrowed from around ₹144 crore in FY24 to about ₹97 crore in FY25. Nothing about that makes Open profitable — it still spent roughly ₹3.5 for every rupee it earned in FY25 (Inc42) — but for the first time in years the two lines were moving the right way at the same time.

The money behind it

Open raised a lot of attention on a relatively modest amount of capital. Total funding across its rounds is reported at roughly $187 million (Clay, Crunchbase). The shape:

• Series B (June 2019): about $30 million, led by Tiger Global and Tanglin Venture Partners, with 3one4 Capital, Speedinvest and BetterCapital/AngelList Syndicate participating.
• Series C (September 2021): ₹453 crore, with Temasek and Google joining existing backers Tiger Global and 3one4 Capital; valuation reported around $500 million at the time (Business Standard).
• Series D (May 2022): $50 million led by IIFL Finance, with Tiger Global, Temasek and 3one4 Capital following on. This is the round that pushed the valuation past $1 billion and made Open India’s 100th unicorn, and Kerala’s first (PYMNTS, TechCrunch, YourStory).
• Acquisition: in December 2021 Open bought consumer neobank Finin for about $10 million to widen its offering and deepen bank ties (TechCrunch).

What each backer changed is worth naming. Tiger Global’s 2019 cheque set the growth pace; Google’s 2021 entry gave the platform a distribution and credibility halo in the SME cloud stack; IIFL Finance’s lead in 2022 tied a lending balance sheet to a payments front-end. The notable feature is that the unicorn tag came on a small $50 million round in a falling market, which is exactly why the valuation has never been independently re-tested with a fresh priced round since.

How Open makes money

Open’s revenue engine is thinner than its brand suggests, and the mechanics matter.

• Transaction and platform fees: Open earns on payments and payouts flowing through business accounts, and on subscriptions to its dashboard tools. The company has said larger customers pay upwards of ₹20 lakh–24 lakh a year (company-stated).
• Embedded finance (Zwitch) and software (BankingStack): API and licence revenue from other companies and from banks that use Open’s rails and banking software.
• Float and treasury income: a meaningful chunk of headline revenue is not operating at all. In FY24, of ₹46 crore total revenue, about ₹21 crore came from interest and gains on investments; in FY25, about ₹12 crore of the ₹58 crore total income came from interest on deposits (Entrackr, Inc42). The core software business is smaller than the top line implies.
• Where the margin sits: as a layer over partner banks, Open keeps a slice of transaction economics and its own subscriptions while the bank holds the deposit and the licence. The part people get wrong is assuming a neobank captures banking-sized spreads; Open captures software-sized fees on banking-sized volumes, which is a much thinner cut.

The numbers

All figures below are from Open’s filings with the Registrar of Companies, as reported by Entrackr and Inc42. Where the two outlets differ slightly, both are noted in the text. Unit: ₹ crore.

The pattern: operating revenue has stayed stubbornly small and even fell in FY24, while total income has been flattered by treasury gains. Losses, though, have fallen every year since FY22 — from ₹249 crore to ₹242 crore to about ₹169 crore to about ₹109 crore — which is the real signal in the table. FY24 net loss is reported as ₹169.68 crore by Entrackr and ₹168.4 crore by Inc42; FY25 net loss as ₹108.8 crore and ₹108.9 crore respectively.

Where the money comes from

Two splits explain the shape of the business, and both hold a small surprise.

• Operating vs non-operating: in FY24 roughly ₹21 crore of ₹46 crore total revenue — nearly half — was interest and investment gains, not software fees (Entrackr). By FY25 the operating share had improved: about ₹46 crore of ₹58 crore came from operations, with roughly ₹12 crore from interest on deposits (Inc42). The surprise is how much of the reported “revenue” has historically been Open earning a return on its own venture capital rather than selling to customers.
• Cost split (FY25): employee benefit expenses were about ₹98 crore, the dominant cost, down about 13% year on year after the layoffs; IT/software costs about ₹18 crore; advertising about ₹5 crore, down roughly 41% (Inc42). This is a people-and-platform business, not a marketing-led one.
• Balance-sheet cushion: Open still held about ₹202 crore in cash and bank balances at the end of FY25 (Entrackr), which is what buys it time to keep narrowing losses.

The risks

• No licence, borrowed rails. Open does not hold a banking licence; it depends on partner banks and on a regulatory environment that has tightened around fintech intermediaries. If the RBI or a partner bank changes the terms on which non-banks can offer account and payment services, Open’s core product is exposed at the root. The mechanism is direct: its distribution runs through relationships it does not ultimately control.
• The valuation gap. A company valued above $1 billion in 2022 was still earning only about ₹46 crore from operations in FY25. Until a fresh priced round or an IPO tests that number, the unicorn tag is a 2022 data point, not a current market clearing price — a real risk for employees holding ESOPs and for any down-round scenario.
• Thin, contested revenue base. Operating revenue that actually fell in FY24 and leans partly on treasury income shows how hard SME neobanking is to monetise. The wider sector backdrop is unforgiving: neobanks globally have struggled to turn user growth into durable revenue (Inc42), and Open competes for the same SMEs as RazorpayX, Cashfree and the banks’ own digital offerings.

The takeaway

Open’s lesson is about the difference between a valuation and a business. The company built genuinely useful infrastructure, earned a landmark unicorn tag, and then had to spend three hard years — an accounting reset, layoffs, pay cuts and a year of shrinking revenue — learning to live inside the price the market had put on it. The encouraging part is that it did the unglamorous work: FY25 revenue up 85%, losses down about 36%, costs cut without the top line collapsing. The transferable point for any founder is blunt. Raising at a big number is the easy half; the hard half is quietly rebuilding the company until the number is something you could defend in a room full of new investors. Open is not there yet, but for the first time its numbers are arguing on its side.

Frequently asked questions

Is Open a bank?

No. Open Financial Technologies does not hold a banking licence. It is a neobanking or connected-banking platform that sits on top of partner banks such as ICICI Bank, State Bank of India and Axis Bank, adding software for payments, payouts, reconciliation and accounting.

When did Open become a unicorn?

In May 2022, after a $50 million Series D round led by IIFL Finance that valued the company at more than $1 billion. Open was widely reported as India’s 100th unicorn and Kerala’s first.

How much money does Open make?

In FY25 Open reported about ₹46 crore in revenue from operations and roughly ₹58 crore in total income, with a net loss of about ₹109 crore, according to its ROC filings reported by Entrackr and Inc42. It is not yet profitable.

Who founded Open?

Anish Achuthan, Mabel Chacko, Ajeesh Achuthan and Deena Jacob founded the company in 2017 in Bengaluru. Anish and Mabel had earlier built the payments venture Zwitch, which was acquired by Citrus Payments in 2015.

Why are Open’s losses so large?

Open spent heavily on people and platform to build scale before revenue, peaking at about ₹297 crore of expenditure in FY23 to earn roughly ₹30 crore. Accumulated losses reached about ₹1,921 crore by FY25, though annual losses have fallen every year since FY22.

Sources

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

• Entrackr — “Neobank unicorn Open posts Rs 46 Cr revenue in FY25; outstanding losses mounts to Rs 1,921 Cr” (September 2025)
• Entrackr — “Neobank Open’s FY24 revenue drops to Rs 25 Cr, outstanding losses cross Rs 1,800 Cr” (September 2024)
• Entrackr — “Exclusive: Neobank Open lays off around 50 employees” (April 2023)
• Inc42 — “Neobank OPEN Spent INR 3.5 To Earn Every Rupee In FY25” (2025)
• Inc42 — “OPEN Spent INR 195 Cr To Earn INR 25 Cr Revenue In FY24” (2024)
• Inc42 — “Neobanking Unicorn OPEN Spent INR 297 Cr To Clock INR 30 Cr Revenue In FY23” (2023)
• ORF (Observer Research Foundation) — “Open Financial Technologies: Asia’s first neo-banking platform for SMBs and startups”
• PYMNTS — “Open Becomes India’s 100th Unicorn After Series D” (May 2022)
• TechCrunch — “Google-backed neobank Open becomes unicorn with new funding” (May 2022) and “Google-backed neobank Open acquires Finin for $10 million” (December 2021)
• YourStory — “Fintech startup Open becomes India’s 100th unicorn” (May 2022)
• Business Standard — “Google, 3one4 Capital, and Temasek invest Rs 453 cr in neo-bank Open” (September 2021)
• Crowdfund Insider — “Bengaluru’s Open Financial Technologies Finalizes $50M Series D Round” (May 2022)
• Clay / Crunchbase — Open Financial Technologies funding and investor profiles
• Trading Economics — USD/INR reference rate (September 2026)

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