Startup Deep Dive : Affle — the adtech company that gets paid only when an ad converts

Affle gets paid only when an advertisement actually converts a person into a customer — a model it calls cost per converted user, or CPCU — and in the year to March 2026 that single outcome-based model delivered roughly 456 million converted users and about 99.7% of the company’s ₹2,709.3 crore ($2.82 billion at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) in consolidated revenue. It is a rare thing in advertising: a firm that does not sell impressions or clicks, but results.

The contradiction sits in the company’s own paperwork. India’s most valuable listed adtech business, worth about ₹22,232 crore ($2.3 billion) on 25 September 2026, was first incorporated back in 1994 as a shell called Tejus Securities Private Limited, spent its early life selling clunky SMS-based mobile ads out of Singapore, and only became “Affle 3i Limited” in April 2025. This deep dive traces how a mobile-marketing outfit most people have never heard of turned a pay-per-outcome pricing trick into one of the few consistently profitable adtech companies anywhere — and is careful throughout to separate the listed Indian entity from its Singapore promoter, and audited figures from company commentary.

Quick facts

What Affle does

Affle is a mobile advertising technology company that helps app-based businesses — e-commerce, fintech, gaming, food delivery, streaming — acquire and re-engage users, and it charges for measurable outcomes rather than for eyeballs. The business splits into two parts:

• Consumer Platform — the CPCU engine that finds, targets and converts app users for advertisers. It was about 99.7% of revenue in FY25 (ICICIdirect).
• Enterprise Platform — a much smaller business offering mobile marketing, data and market-research tools to enterprises and telecom operators.

The customer is the advertiser; the “converted user” is a real person who installs an app and then does something valuable — a transaction, a sign-up, a repeat visit. Affle’s platforms sit between publishers with ad inventory and brands that want results, using consumer-intelligence data and, increasingly, generative-AI targeting to decide which ad to show whom.

The founding insight

Anuj Khanna Sohum founded Affle in Singapore in 2005. He was already a serial technology entrepreneur — a National University of Singapore computer-engineering graduate who, by his own account, had a first venture acquired by a public company before he had even finished his degree, and who later added executive programmes at Harvard Business School and Stanford. His bet was early and specific: that the mobile phone, not the desktop, would become the primary screen through which people discovered and bought things, and that whoever could measure and monetise attention on that small screen would own a large market.

The founding insight that still defines the company was about pricing. Instead of selling advertisers impressions or clicks — metrics that are easy to inflate and hard to tie to business value — Affle built its model around the converted user: the advertiser pays when the desired action happens. That reframing turned advertising from a cost of unknown value into something closer to a performance fee, and it is the reason the company describes itself as consumer-intelligence driven rather than as a media seller. The early Indian holding company was, unglamorously, a 1994 shell named Tejus Securities that was later converted into a public limited company and renamed Affle (India) Limited on 13 July 2018 ahead of the listing.

The struggle years

Affle’s story is not a straight line up. The early group cut its teeth on “SMS 2.0” and other text-message advertising formats out of Singapore, India and the UK — a business that the smartphone and the app economy would soon make obsolete, forcing a long migration from messaging-era ads to app-install and in-app conversion advertising. That pivot, from selling SMS-based reach to selling measurable app conversions, was the difference between fading with a dying format and riding the one that replaced it.

The financial record shows the strain of that transition. Company and analyst summaries note that profits grew in every recent year except a dip around FY2017, the kind of wobble that betrays a business remaking its product and its customers at the same time. Growth capital came not from Indian venture funds but from a patient, unusual set of strategic investors into the Singapore parent, Affle Holdings — a structure that solved the funding problem but planted a related-party question that would follow the company onto the stock market. By the time it was ready to list, Affle had reached profitability, but it had done so as a niche, founder-controlled mobile marketer with a promoter registered in another country and a business model most public-market investors had never had to price.

The turning point

The turning point was the August 2019 IPO. The issue — about ₹459 crore, a ₹90 crore fresh issue plus an offer for sale, in a ₹740–745 price band — ran from 29 to 31 July 2019 and was subscribed roughly 86 times. On 8 August 2019 the shares listed on the NSE and BSE at close to ₹930, about 25% above the issue price. The listing did two things at once: it converted a little-known mobile marketer into a public company with a currency (its shares) for acquisitions, and it forced the CPCU model into the daylight of quarterly disclosure.

The numbers on either side of that event show why it mattered. In FY2019, the year before listing, Affle reported revenue from operations of about ₹249 crore and normalised profit of roughly ₹49 crore; in FY2020, the first full listed year, revenue rose to about ₹334 crore. Six years later, in FY2026, revenue had reached ₹2,709.3 crore — roughly eight times the FY2020 figure — and profit after tax ₹454.9 crore. The IPO did not create the growth, but it capitalised and accelerated it, funding a run of acquisitions that widened the platform well beyond its original footprint.

The money behind it

Affle is unusual in that most of the “money behind it” came as strategic corporate capital into the Singapore parent, not as classic venture rounds, and much of the subsequent expansion was paid for with post-IPO cash and acquisitions. The shape:

• Strategic backers of parent Affle Holdings — over the years the group counted Microsoft, Bennett, Coleman & Co (the Times Group), Japan’s Itochu, D2C Inc (an NTT DoCoMo–Dentsu joint venture) and Centurion Corporation among its investors (company “About” disclosures).
• IPO, August 2019 — about ₹459 crore raised/offered; subscribed ~86x; listed at a ~25% premium (Chittorgarh, Business Standard).
• Acquisition-led growth — the listed entity used cash and periodic fund-raises (the board approved a fund-raise of up to $120 million in May 2026) to buy capability rather than build it.

The acquisitions themselves are the clearest map of strategy:

• Vizury commerce business — September 2018, about $10 million (retargeting and push, MarketScreener).
• RevX — 2019, programmatic app retargeting.
• mediasmart — February 2020, about €5.1 million, adding connected-TV and DOOH programmatic (Spain).
• Jampp — June 2021, about $41.3 million, programmatic app marketing with strength in Latin America.
• Appnext — 66.67% stake for about $17.25 million, on-device app discovery (Economic Times).
• YouAppi — 2023, a gaming-focused programmatic app-marketing platform.

How it makes money

The mechanics of the CPCU model are the whole business, so they are worth walking through carefully:

• Money in — advertisers pay Affle for each converted user delivered. FY25 average CPCU was ₹57.5 (up 2.3% YoY), and converted users reached about 393 million (up 25.6% YoY); in FY26 the platform delivered about 456 million (45.6 crore) converted users (company results, ICICIdirect).
• Costs out — the largest cost is buying the underlying ad inventory (publisher/traffic payouts) on which conversions are generated; the rest is data, cloud, and people.
• Where the margin sits — the edge is in targeting: better consumer-intelligence and AI matching mean more conversions per rupee of inventory bought, which lifts gross margin. FY25 EBITDA was ₹483.2 crore at a ~21.3% margin; FY26 EBITDA was ₹610.1 crore, up 26.3% YoY.
• The part people get wrong — because Affle is paid per outcome, its revenue is not the advertiser’s full media budget; it is closer to a managed-performance fee, which is why revenue can look modest against the ad spend it influences, yet convert to unusually reliable profit.

The numbers

Consolidated results, in ₹ crore. FY refers to the year ended 31 March.

• Revenue rose from ₹1,434 crore in FY23 to ₹2,709 crore in FY26 — about 89% growth in three years (Screener; company FY26 results).
• Profit after tax grew from ₹245 crore (FY23) to ₹454.9 crore (FY26), a roughly 86% rise, tracking revenue closely — unusual for adtech, where scale often comes at the expense of profit.
• FY26 revenue growth of 19.5% YoY was slower than FY25’s 23%, a deceleration worth watching (company results).

Where the money comes from

Two splits define the revenue base — one by product concentration, one by geography — and both carry a surprise.

• By platform — the Consumer Platform CPCU business was about 99.7% of FY25 revenue; the Enterprise Platform is a rounding error by comparison. The surprise is how single-model the company is: nearly all of a ₹2,700 crore business rides on one pricing mechanism.
• By geography — in FY25, India and Emerging Markets contributed about 72.8% of revenue and Developed Markets about 27.2% (ICICIdirect). Despite a Singapore heritage and acquisitions in Spain, Latin America and beyond, the growth engine is emerging-market app users, not Western advertisers.
• By user economics — revenue is a product of two levers, volume (converted users, up 25.6% in FY25) and price (average CPCU, up only 2.3%). The bulk of growth is coming from more conversions, not higher prices — a healthier but more capacity-hungry way to grow.

The risks

The risks are concrete and, in several cases, disclosed or flagged by analysts:

• Privacy and platform rules — the CPCU model depends on data to target and attribute conversions. India’s DPDP Act, plus GDPR/CCPA enforcement and mobile-OS changes by Apple (App Tracking Transparency) and Google (identifier and cookie restrictions), can degrade data quality, targeting accuracy and therefore CPCU economics (ICICI Securities; Sushil Finance).
• Acquisition and goodwill dependence — growth has leaned on a string of acquisitions (Jampp, Appnext, YouAppi and others). If acquired businesses underperform, the company carries integration risk and potential goodwill impairment on the balance sheet.
• Promoter structure and related parties — the promoter, Affle Holdings Pte Ltd, sits in Singapore, and the group’s history of related-party arrangements is a recurring governance question for a company whose value rests on trust in its numbers.
• Valuation and competition — at a P/E of about 46.5 (September 2026), the stock prices in continued high growth; any slowdown, or intensifying competition from global adtech platforms and AI-native marketing tools, leaves little room for error.

The takeaway

The transferable lesson from Affle is not about advertising; it is about pricing. Most companies compete on the same axis as their rivals — more reach, lower cost, faster delivery — and end up in a race that erodes margin. Affle changed the axis. By charging for the converted user rather than the impression, it aligned its own revenue with the only thing its customers actually care about, and in doing so built a business that grows profit roughly in step with revenue in an industry famous for doing neither. The deeper point is that a pricing model can be a moat: once a company is trusted to be paid only for results, it earns both pricing power and customer loyalty that a cheaper competitor selling clicks cannot easily copy. The open questions — privacy rules, acquisition digestion, a rich multiple — are real, but they are the problems of a company that got the fundamental choice right.

Frequently asked questions

Is Affle India still called Affle India Limited?

No. Affle (India) Limited was renamed Affle 3i Limited on 11 April 2025, after shareholder approval. It still trades under the ticker AFFLE on the NSE (BSE code 542752), and is headquartered in Gurugram.

What does CPCU mean, and why does it matter?

CPCU stands for cost per converted user. Advertisers pay Affle for each user who is not just shown an ad but actually converts — installs an app and takes a valuable action. It matters because it ties Affle’s revenue to outcomes rather than to impressions or clicks, and it accounted for about 99.7% of FY25 revenue.

How large is Affle financially?

In FY26 (year to March 2026) Affle reported consolidated revenue of ₹2,709.3 crore, up 19.5% year on year, and profit after tax of ₹454.9 crore, up 19.1%. Its market value was about ₹22,232 crore (~$2.3 billion) on 25 September 2026.

Where does Affle’s revenue come from geographically?

In FY25, India and Emerging Markets contributed about 72.8% of revenue and Developed Markets about 27.2%. The business grows mainly on emerging-market app users, despite acquisitions in Europe and Latin America.

Who founded and controls Affle?

Affle was founded by Anuj Khanna Sohum in Singapore in 2005; he remains Founder, Chairman, Managing Director and CEO. The promoter of the listed company is Affle Holdings Pte Ltd, based in Singapore.

Sources

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

• Affle 3i Limited, “Affle reports robust performance for Q4 & 12M FY2026” results release, May 2026 (affle.com)
• Screener.in, Affle 3i Ltd consolidated financials, market cap, P/E, September 2026
• Affle 3i Limited, change-of-name announcement (Affle (India) Limited to Affle 3i Limited), April 2025 (affle.com); MarketScreener India, April 2025
• Business Today and Business Standard, Affle India IPO listing coverage, August 2019
• Chittorgarh and IPO Central, Affle India IPO details (price band, size, subscription), July–August 2019
• Affle “About Us” and IPO Central company history (Tejus Securities incorporation, founder background), 2019–2025
• ICICIdirect research notes, Affle FY25 CPCU metrics, converted users, geography split and EBITDA, 2025
• MarketScreener and Exchange4media, Affle acquisitions (Vizury, mediasmart, Jampp, Appnext, YouAppi), 2018–2023
• ICICI Securities and Sushil Finance research, Affle risk factors (privacy, DPDP, acquisitions), 2024–2025
• Affle FY2019 and FY2020 earnings presentations (pre-IPO and first-listed-year revenue and profit), 2019–2020
• stockanalysis.com, Affle 3i employee count (617 as of 31 March 2025)

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