Startup Deep Dive : KredX — revenue fell 66% even as it won RBI and IFSCA licences

In FY25, KredX booked ₹14.1 crore in revenue, down 66.1% from the ₹41.61 crore it reported a year earlier, a collapse that would read like a company falling apart. It is not. The same year, KredX became one of the very few companies in India to hold both an RBI licence to run a Trade Receivables Discounting System and an IFSCA licence to run a cross-border trade-finance exchange out of GIFT City, two permits that most of its older, unregulated peers do not have and cannot easily get.

That gap between a shrinking headline number and a widening regulatory moat is the whole KredX story. The company spent nearly a decade running the country’s best-known invoice-discounting marketplace outside any financial regulator’s remit, then deliberately walked into the two toughest licensing regimes it could find. This deep dive traces how a 2015 startup backed by Tiger Global and Sequoia (now Peak XV) reached that point, what the numbers actually say, and why the coming years are a bigger test than anything it has faced so far.

Quick facts

What KredX does

KredX runs a marketplace that turns unpaid invoices into cash. A supplier that has sold goods to a large, creditworthy corporate buyer but has to wait 30, 60 or 90 days for payment can put that invoice on KredX and get most of its value upfront, at a discount, from a financier. The financier collects the full amount when the buyer pays. KredX sits in the middle: it onboards the parties, prices the risk, handles collections and takes a fee.

Today that single idea runs across three regulatory tracks:

• The core marketplace — invoice discounting and supply-chain finance for MSMEs and mid-market suppliers, historically funded by institutional and high-net-worth financiers outside the formal TReDS system.
• DTX (Domestic Trade Exchange) — KredX’s RBI-licensed TReDS platform, which received final RBI approval in January 2025 and became the fifth RBI-regulated TReDS operator in India (Business Standard, Inc42).
• GTX (Global Trade Exchange) — an IFSCA-licensed International Trade Financing Services (ITFS) platform at GIFT City for export and import factoring, forfaiting and cross-border supply-chain finance (company statements, Business Standard).

The founding insight

KredX was founded in 2015 by three technologists who had spent their earlier careers inside the machinery of consumer credit. Manish Kumar, the CEO, is an IIT-Kanpur alumnus who had worked at HSBC on credit-card credit-risk acquisition and then as an associate director at Capital One. Anurag Jain, the COO, is also from IIT-Kanpur, with stints at Oracle as an engineer and at HSBC in decisioning technology. Puneet Agarwal, the CTO, is a Stanford alumnus.

The insight was mundane and enormous at the same time. Indian suppliers, especially small ones, routinely wait months to be paid by their big customers, while the invoice itself, a promise from a solid buyer, sits idle. Banks were slow and collateral-hungry. There was, in effect, a large pool of low-risk, short-duration receivables that nobody had made liquid. KredX’s pitch was to build the plumbing that let a creditworthy buyer’s payment obligation become an asset a financier could buy in days rather than weeks. The founders came at it as a risk-and-technology problem, which is exactly what invoice discounting at scale turns out to be.

The struggle years

For most of its life, KredX operated in a regulatory grey zone, and that is the tension that runs through its history. Invoice discounting offered as an investment product in India sat outside the direct purview of both SEBI and RBI, which made it attractive and fragile at the same time. Attractive, because KredX could let sophisticated individuals and institutions fund invoices and earn short-tenure yields without waiting for a regulator to design a rulebook. Fragile, because that same absence of oversight is what analysts and consumer-finance writers flag as the sector’s core weakness: thin transparency, uneven KYC, and no regulator standing behind investors if an invoice goes bad.

Two hard realities defined these years:

• Regulatory overhang from the start. As early as 2016, commentators were debating whether the RBI’s approach to invoice-discounting startups risked being disproportionate, a sign that the ground under KredX’s model was never settled (IndiaCorpLaw, November 2016).
• Asset-quality and default risk on the investor side. Independent reviews and investor accounts have reported defaults and delayed payments on invoices funded through such platforms, the built-in hazard of any model where the underlying risk is a third party’s willingness and ability to pay (thealtinvestor; InvoiceFollowups, 2024–2026).

The deeper struggle was strategic rather than a single near-death event: a business built on an unregulated marketplace cannot scale indefinitely once regulators decide the activity should be licensed. KredX had to choose between staying nimble and unregulated, or accepting the cost and scrutiny of formal licences. It chose the licences, and the financials since show how expensive that choice has been in the short term.

The turning point

The turning point is not one date but a two-year pivot from marketplace to regulated exchange, with two licences on either side of it.

On one side, in May 2023, KredX said it had received final approval from the IFSCA to go commercially live with GTX, its ITFS platform at GIFT City, describing itself as the first entity to secure an ITFS licence there under licence number IFSC/FC/ITFS/2022-23/0001 (company statements via LinkedIn; Business Standard). That put KredX inside a formal cross-border trade-finance framework for the first time.

On the other side, in January 2025, KredX secured final RBI approval to operate a TReDS platform, DTX, becoming the fifth RBI-regulated TReDS operator alongside RXIL, M1xchange, Invoicemart and C2treds (Business Standard; Inc42, January 2025). The timing was deliberate: in November 2024 the government widened the TReDS net, mandating that companies with turnover above ₹250 crore and central public-sector enterprises register on a TReDS platform, expanding the addressable pool of mandatory participants. Industry estimates cited at the time put TReDS transaction volumes at roughly $30 billion a year, with projections of around $50 billion by 2026 (Inc42).

The number on the far side of this pivot is the FY25 revenue fall to ₹14.1 crore. Read alone, it looks like decline. Read against the licences, it looks like a company deliberately migrating off a legacy, unregulated revenue base and rebuilding on regulated rails that take time to fill.

The money behind it

KredX raised early and from marquee names, then went quiet. Its disclosed funding history:

• Seed, 2016: Prime Venture Partners invested $750,000 to help the platform scale early operations (YourStory, April 2016).
• Early round, 2016: KredX raised $6.25 million from Sequoia Capital India (now Peak XV Partners) and Prime Venture Partners (IBEF).
• Series B, December 2019: $26 million (about ₹187 crore) led by Tiger Global Management, with existing investors participating; earmarked for hiring, new products, proprietary technology and potential strategic acquisitions (Inc42, December 2019).

What the backers changed:

• Prime Venture Partners provided the earliest institutional conviction, funding the platform before invoice discounting was a recognised category in India.
• Sequoia / Peak XV added scale-stage credibility and network, helping KredX move from a niche tool to a recognised marketplace.
• Tiger Global led the growth round that funded the expansion into new products and the groundwork for the regulated exchanges.

Two facts frame the money story. First, total disclosed funding is roughly $32.75 million (Inc42), modest for a company of KredX’s public profile. Second, there has been no disclosed priced round since the December 2019 Series B, meaning the company has run for more than five years without fresh external equity on the record, funding its transition largely from its existing base while revenue contracted. An ESOP pool of about 4.73% appears on cap-table data (thekredible).

How it makes money

KredX earns from being the intermediary in a receivables transaction, not from lending its own balance sheet in the classic sense. The money flows like this:

• Money in — transaction and platform fees. On each discounted invoice, KredX charges fees tied to facilitating the deal between supplier, buyer and financier. The financier earns the discount (the gap between the invoice’s face value and what they pay upfront); KredX earns a service cut on the flow.
• Money in — supply-chain finance and enterprise programmes. Larger, structured programmes for corporates (early-payment and vendor-financing arrangements) add recurring volume beyond one-off invoices.
• Money in — regulated-exchange fees (emerging). DTX (TReDS) and GTX (ITFS) are designed to earn regulated transaction fees on domestic and cross-border trade-finance flows, replacing legacy off-exchange revenue over time.
• Costs out. Technology and platform engineering, risk and credit assessment, collections and operations, compliance for two regulators, and employee costs, including ESOPs.

The part people get wrong: KredX is often described as a lender. Its historical model was closer to a marketplace and risk-pricing layer, where the capital came from financiers and investors rather than from KredX itself. That is also why the revenue line is volatile: it tracks facilitated volume and fee mix, not a stable interest book. In its FY24 filing, KredX reported operating revenue of ₹41.61 crore, up 25% from ₹33.25 crore in FY23, and narrowed its net loss by about 21% to ₹31.21 crore from ₹39.16 crore, a sign the marketplace was improving on operating leverage before the FY25 transition-year drop (thekredible; Inc42 Datalabs).

The numbers

Three years of reported financials for Minions Ventures Private Limited (KredX), figures in ₹ crore, as compiled by Inc42 Datalabs and thekredible from statutory filings:

What the table says, in plain terms:

• Revenue is not on a steady climb. It rose from FY23 to FY24, then fell by roughly two-thirds in FY25, the sharpest single-year move in the set.
• Losses are narrowing every year. The net loss fell from ₹39.16 crore (FY23) to ₹31.21 crore (FY24) to ₹24.1 crore (FY25), even as revenue shrank, which points to cost discipline during the transition.
• FY25 is a transition year, not a run-rate. The revenue drop coincides with the shift away from the legacy off-exchange marketplace toward the newly licensed DTX and GTX rails, which had barely begun contributing.

Where the money comes from

KredX’s activity spans domestic and cross-border trade finance, across a few channels:

• Domestic invoice discounting / supply-chain finance — the historic core, connecting suppliers to financiers against buyer invoices.
• Regulated domestic exchange (DTX / TReDS) — targeting the mandatory-participation pool created by the November 2024 rule for companies above ₹250 crore turnover and CPSEs (Inc42).
• Cross-border trade finance (GTX / ITFS at GIFT City) — export and import factoring, forfaiting and reverse factoring for Indian exporters and importers.

The surprise is scale versus revenue. KredX has publicly described very large cumulative throughput on its platform, company-stated figures of over ₹55,000 crore (roughly $5.7 billion at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) in invoices processed over its lifetime and hundreds of thousands of invoices across thousands of enterprises and financiers (StartupTalky; company statements). During Muhurat trading in October 2023, KredX said it aimed to discount invoices worth over ₹500 crore in a single festive session (Business Standard). Yet its reported annual operating revenue has stayed in the low tens of crore. That is the defining feature of a thin-take-rate marketplace: enormous gross flow, a small sliver of it captured as fee income, and a business whose reported top line looks tiny next to the value moving through it.

The risks

KredX faces concrete, mechanism-level risks, not vague ones:

• Revenue concentration and transition risk. The 66.1% FY25 revenue drop shows how exposed the business is while it migrates from an unregulated marketplace to regulated exchanges. If DTX and GTX volumes do not ramp fast enough to replace legacy fees, the top line stays depressed while the two regulated setups carry compliance cost.
• Late entry into a crowded TReDS market. DTX is the fifth RBI-licensed TReDS platform, entering after RXIL, M1xchange, Invoicemart and C2treds already built financier and corporate networks. On an exchange, liquidity begets liquidity, and a late entrant has to win share from incumbents who got there years earlier (Business Standard; Inc42).
• Asset quality on the underlying invoices. The model’s core hazard is buyer default or delayed payment. Independent reviews have reported defaults and payment delays on invoices funded through such platforms, which, if they recur, damage financier trust, the one thing a receivables marketplace cannot lose (thealtinvestor; InvoiceFollowups).
• Funding and runway. With no disclosed priced round since December 2019 and continuing annual losses (₹24.1 crore in FY25), KredX is executing a costly, multi-licence pivot without publicly known fresh equity, a squeeze that limits how long it can subsidise the transition (Inc42).

The takeaway

The transferable lesson from KredX is about the price of getting regulated on purpose. Plenty of Indian fintechs grew fast precisely because they operated in categories no regulator had defined yet. KredX did that too, and built the best-known invoice-discounting brand outside the formal system. Then it made the harder call: to trade the freedom of the grey zone for two of the strictest licences available, an RBI TReDS permit and an IFSCA ITFS permit, betting that the future of trade finance in India runs on regulated rails rather than around them. The FY25 numbers are what that bet costs upfront, a two-thirds revenue fall as the old base is retired before the new one fills. Whether the bet pays depends on something no licence can guarantee: that DTX and GTX attract enough financiers and corporates, fast enough, to make the moat worth what it cost to dig. For any founder in a lightly regulated category, KredX is a live case study in choosing the slower, dearer, more defensible road before you are forced onto it.

Frequently asked questions

What is KredX and what does it do?

KredX is an Indian supply-chain finance company, run by the legal entity Minions Ventures Private Limited, that operates an invoice-discounting marketplace. It lets suppliers raise working capital against unpaid invoices from creditworthy buyers, with financiers funding those invoices at a discount. It also runs DTX, an RBI-licensed TReDS platform, and GTX, an IFSCA-licensed cross-border trade-finance exchange.

Who founded KredX and when?

KredX was founded in 2015 in Bengaluru by Manish Kumar (CEO), Anurag Jain (COO) and Puneet Agarwal (CTO). Manish Kumar and Anurag Jain are IIT-Kanpur alumni with backgrounds in credit risk and technology at firms including HSBC, Capital One and Oracle; Puneet Agarwal is a Stanford alumnus.

Is KredX RBI-regulated?

Yes, in part. In January 2025 KredX received final RBI approval to run a TReDS platform, DTX, becoming the fifth RBI-regulated TReDS operator in India. It also holds an IFSCA licence for its GTX international trade-finance platform at GIFT City. Its historic invoice-discounting marketplace, however, operated outside direct SEBI or RBI regulation.

How much money has KredX raised?

KredX has raised roughly $32.75 million in disclosed funding, according to Inc42. Backers include Tiger Global, Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia Capital India) and Prime Venture Partners. Its last disclosed priced round was a $26 million Series B led by Tiger Global in December 2019.

Why did KredX’s revenue fall in FY25?

KredX’s operating revenue fell 66.1% to ₹14.1 crore in FY25 from ₹41.61 crore in FY24, per Inc42 Datalabs. The drop coincides with the company shifting away from its legacy off-exchange invoice-discounting model toward its newly licensed regulated platforms, DTX and GTX, which had only just begun operating. Its net loss narrowed to ₹24.1 crore over the same period.

Sources

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

• Inc42 — KredX company, funding and financials profile (2026)
• Inc42 — “KredX Gets RBI Nod To Launch TReDS Platform” (January 2025)
• Inc42 — “KredX Raises $26 Mn From Tiger Global, Others” (December 2019)
• Business Standard — “Supply chain platform KredX secures RBI’s approval to launch TReDS platform” (January 2025)
• Business Standard — “KredX aims to discount invoices worth over Rs 500 crore in Muhurat Trading” (October 2023)
• Business Standard — “Four platforms get IFSCA licence for factoring business at Gift City” (October 2021)
• thekredible — KredX financials and “KredX Boosts Revenue Growth, Losses Narrow” (FY24 report, 2024)
• YourStory — “Prime Venture Partners invests $750,000 in fintech startup” (April 2016)
• IBEF — “KredX raises US$6.25 million from Sequoia India, Prime Venture Partners” (2016)
• Entrepreneur India — “The Working Capital Provider: Manish Kumar, CEO and Founder, KredX”
• ZaubaCorp / Tofler / MCA — Minions Ventures Private Limited registration (CIN U74900KA2015PTC080305)
• LinkedIn (Anurag Jain) — KredX IFSCA final approval for GTX (May 2023) and first global trade export deal
• StartupTalky — KredX success story and company-stated cumulative volumes
• IndiaCorpLaw — “Regulation of invoice discounting start-ups” (November 2016)
• thealtinvestor; InvoiceFollowups — risk and review coverage of invoice-discounting platforms (2024–2026)

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