Startup Deep Dive : Airpay — the payments firm that raised once and stayed profitable

Airpay has raised roughly ₹24 crore ($3.6 million) of outside equity in its entire history, in a single round back in 2017. In the year to March 2025, the same Mumbai payments company reported ₹213.1 crore of operating revenue and a net profit of about ₹9 crore, per financials sourced from its regulatory filings by Inc42 and Entrackr.

That combination is the whole story in miniature. Revenue jumped 65.6% year on year, yet the profit barely moved, easing from ₹9.8 crore in FY24 to ₹9.0 crore in FY25, growth that added almost no money to the bottom line. And there is a smaller correction worth making up front: the marquee early backer people sometimes reach for is not Amitabh Bachchan, for whom we found no verifiable link to the company, but the late stock trader Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, who put money in alongside his brother Rajesh.

Quick facts

What they do

Airpay is a payment aggregator: it sits between a merchant and the banking rails, so a business can accept money from its customers and, separately, push money out to its own vendors, through one platform. What separates it from a pure online gateway is that Airpay works across channels rather than only on a website checkout. In practice its stack spans:

• Online payment gateway for websites and apps, supporting cards, net banking, UPI and wallets.
• Offline acceptance through POS terminals and QR codes at physical outlets.
• UPI, payment links and IVR or call-centre collection for businesses without a formal checkout.
• A collections and disbursement layer aimed at banks and non-banking financial companies (NBFCs), plus value-added services the company lists as business loans, risk and anti-money-laundering tooling, and e-signatures.

The buyer is the business, not the shopper. Airpay’s named clients skew toward lending and insurance: it lists Shriram, PNB Housing Finance, Suryoday Small Finance Bank, India Shelter and Star Health among BFSI customers, which tells you the company earns as much from helping regulated lenders collect instalments as from e-commerce checkouts.

The origin

Airpay was started in 2012 by three colleagues from Hungama Digital Media, the Bollywood-backed music and entertainment company. Amit Kapoor, an INSEAD MBA who had worked at TravelGuru, Kunal Jhunjhunwala, who holds a TRIUM global executive MBA and had co-founded a venture called Digitalhathi, and Rohan Deshpande, an electronics and telecom engineer with an MBA, had all watched digital content run into the same wall in India: the content was ready, but paying for it was not. Card penetration was low, cash was king, and the checkout broke the moment a customer stepped away from a laptop. Their founding insight was that acceptance, not the storefront, was the bottleneck, and that a merchant needed one system that worked on the web, on a phone, over a call centre and across a shop counter, rather than a different tool for each. That “one rail for every channel” idea is still the pitch more than a decade later, now dressed as omnichannel payments.

The struggle years

Airpay’s path was slower and quieter than the funding-fuelled fintechs that came after it, and that slowness is the struggle. Two threads stand out, both verifiable.

The first is capital starvation by choice or circumstance. Airpay raised an angel round in April 2016 and then a single Series A of about ₹24 crore ($3.6 million) in March 2017, led by Kalaari Capital with Rakesh and Rajesh Jhunjhunwala. After that, the public funding record goes quiet: trackers show total outside funding of roughly $3.63 million and no fresh institutional round for years, while contemporaries built on hundreds of millions of dollars. A payments business is a scale game, and Airpay had to grow on operating cash rather than on a war chest, which meant it could not buy market share the way Razorpay, PayU or Paytm could.

The second is the loss of two of its three founders from the company’s governance. Airpay was built by Kapoor, Jhunjhunwala and Deshpande, but the board of the operating entity today, per MCA-linked records surfaced on Tofler, lists Kunal Jhunjhunwala, Rajeshkumar Radheshyam Jhunjhunwala and Kalaari’s Rajesh Raju. The other two co-founders no longer sit on it. A founding trio narrowing to one over a decade is a real strain on a young company, whatever the reasons, and it happened without the cushion of repeated fundraising that usually smooths such transitions.

The turning point

The clearest before-and-after is regulatory, and it is recent. Under rules the Reserve Bank of India brought in for payment aggregators, every player that wanted to keep handling merchant money had to win a formal licence rather than operate on legacy permissions. Airpay was among the 32 existing aggregators granted in-principle approval in February 2023. Then, in December 2025, it secured full authorisation across all three categories the RBI runs: online (PA-O), physical POS and QR (PA-P), and cross-border (PA-CB), as reported by Business Standard and Entrackr. The number that matters on the other side of that event is small but decisive: three of three. Holding the cross-border licence in particular puts Airpay in a short list of regulated firms, alongside the likes of Razorpay, PayU, Pine Labs and Easebuzz, cleared to process international payments as well as domestic ones, which is the legal precondition for its stated push beyond India.

The money behind it

Airpay’s cap table is unusually light for a payments company of its age. The shape of the money:

• Angel round, April 2016: the first outside cheque, per Tracxn’s funding record.
• Series A, March 2017: about ₹24 crore ($3.6 million to $3.67 million), led by Kalaari Capital, with Mosaic Capital Services and others named, per MediaNama and Inc42.
• Total raised to date: roughly $3.63 million across those rounds, per Tracxn and Crunchbase, with no large institutional round reported since 2017.

The backers who changed the story are the Jhunjhunwalas. Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, the investor nicknamed the Big Bull, who died on 14 August 2022, and his brother Rajesh Jhunjhunwala put money into the early rounds; Rajesh appears on the operating company’s board in later records. That association is the grain of truth behind the celebrity-investor talk around Airpay. To be precise about the question we were asked to check: we found no evidence that Amitabh Bachchan invested in Airpay, and neither the funding coverage nor the company records name him. The prominent early investor is Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, not Bachchan. Kalaari Capital remains the lead institutional shareholder, and its partner Rajesh Raju sits on the board.

How it makes money

Airpay earns a take on the money that flows through it, plus fees for the software and services wrapped around that flow. Broken down:

• Merchant discount rate (MDR): a small percentage of each card or wallet transaction it processes for a merchant, the core aggregator revenue line.
• Platform and value-added fees: charges for the POS hardware, collections tooling, risk and AML checks, e-sign and reporting sold on top of raw acceptance.
• BFSI collections and disbursements: fees from banks and NBFCs for running their instalment collections and payouts, a stickier, higher-touch business than one-off checkout.

Costs run the other way: payment processing and bank interchange it passes through, technology and personnel, and sales to sign merchants. The part outsiders get wrong is the margin. A payments aggregator does not keep the headline transaction value; it keeps a sliver of it, and on India’s fastest-growing rail, UPI, that sliver is close to zero because the government mandates no MDR on person-to-merchant UPI and on RuPay debit. So Airpay’s ₹213.1 crore of FY25 revenue is not ₹213 crore of margin; total expenses were about ₹185.1 crore, up roughly 55%, which is why nearly doubling revenue produced a profit of only about ₹9 crore. The money is real, but it is thin, and every rupee of it is fought for.

The numbers

Independent trackers report the following for the operating entity, in ₹ crore. FY24 and FY25 are well documented from filings; consistent audited figures for earlier years are not cleanly reported by independent trackers, so we show the two verified years rather than estimate the rest.

Two things are worth reading off that table. Revenue grew 65.6% in a single year, which is fast for a self-funded payments firm. And net profit fell slightly even as revenue surged, so profit as a share of revenue dropped from roughly 7.6% in FY24 to about 4.2% in FY25 on the reported figures. Inc42 pegs FY25 EBITDA at about ₹5.8 crore. The direction is the point: Airpay is buying scale with margin, which is the normal trade for an aggregator racing to matter before the rails commoditise.

Where the money comes from

Airpay does not publish a clean segment split, so this is drawn from its own client roster and product marketing, and should be read as company-stated. The tilt is toward regulated finance and offline India rather than glossy e-commerce. Company-stated reach as listed on its site:

• More than 50 lakh (5 million-plus) consumers touched and over 1,000 business partners.
• Over 200 financial institutions served, with BFSI names such as Shriram, PNB Housing Finance, Suryoday Small Finance Bank, India Shelter and Star Health.
• Claimed acceptance footprint across 136,676-plus villages, 557-plus districts and 35-plus states and union territories.
• Operations described across three countries, India, the UAE and Tanzania, under a “local to global” strategy, and a headcount of about 800.

The surprise sits in that geography. A payments company most people would place in metro e-commerce actually leans on rural and semi-urban collections for lenders, and on two overseas markets that rarely feature in Indian fintech coverage. The cross-border licence won in December 2025 is what makes the overseas half of that ambition legal rather than aspirational.

The risks

Three concrete risks stand out, each with a mechanism.

• Zero-MDR on UPI compresses the core take. India mandates no merchant fee on UPI person-to-merchant and RuPay debit, the fastest-growing rails. Airpay’s founder Kunal Jhunjhunwala has publicly argued against charging fees on UPI, but the flip side is that volume on those rails earns the aggregator little or nothing, which is visible in a profit of about ₹9 crore on ₹213 crore of revenue. If more transaction volume migrates to zero-MDR rails, revenue can grow while margin thins further.
• It is out-capitalised by its rivals. Airpay has raised about $3.6 million in total; competitors including Razorpay, PayU, Pine Labs, Cashfree and BillDesk have raised or deployed orders of magnitude more. In a business where pricing and merchant acquisition are won with cash, a light balance sheet is a structural handicap, and it explains the buy-scale-with-margin pattern in the numbers.
• Governance and key-person concentration. Of three founders, only Kunal Jhunjhunwala is still central; the operating board has narrowed and leans on him and on Kalaari’s representation. For a firm without repeat fundraising to spread dependence, that concentration is a real risk to continuity and to the next stage of capital-raising.

The takeaway

Airpay is a lesson in what capital efficiency actually costs. Raise once, grow on your own cash, and you can absolutely reach ₹213 crore of revenue and stay profitable, which most venture-funded fintechs their size cannot claim. But the same discipline that keeps you alive also caps how fast you can move, and on rails the state has decided should be free to merchants, staying profitable means staying small in margin. The transferable idea is that “profitable” and “winning” are not the same measurement. A company can be the tidier business and still be the smaller one, and for a payments aggregator in India, the market may reward the firm that can afford to lose money for longer over the one that never did.

Frequently asked questions

Did Amitabh Bachchan invest in Airpay?

We found no verifiable evidence that Amitabh Bachchan invested in Airpay; funding coverage and company records do not name him. The prominent early backer often associated with the company is the late stock investor Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, who, with his brother Rajesh Jhunjhunwala, participated in the early rounds alongside lead investor Kalaari Capital.

Who founded Airpay and who runs it now?

Airpay was founded in 2012 by three former Hungama Digital Media colleagues, Amit Kapoor, Kunal Jhunjhunwala and Rohan Deshpande. Kunal Jhunjhunwala leads the company today; the other two co-founders are no longer on the operating company’s board.

Is Airpay profitable?

Yes, on the latest reported figures. The company posted a net profit of about ₹9.0 crore in FY25 (year ended March 2025) on operating revenue of ₹213.1 crore, after a net profit of ₹9.8 crore on ₹128.7 crore of revenue in FY24, per financials compiled by Inc42 and Entrackr from its filings.

What licences does Airpay hold?

Airpay received RBI in-principle payment-aggregator approval in February 2023 and, in December 2025, full authorisation across all three categories: online (PA-O), physical POS and QR (PA-P), and cross-border (PA-CB), per Business Standard and Entrackr.

How much money has Airpay raised?

About $3.63 million in total, per Tracxn and Crunchbase, most of it in a roughly ₹24 crore ($3.6 million) Series A led by Kalaari Capital in March 2017. No large institutional round has been reported since.

Sources

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

• Inc42, “Airpay Financials 2026 – Revenue, P&L & Cash Flow” (company financials page), 2026
• Inc42, “Airpay – A Fintech Funded Company Based Out Of Mumbai” (company profile), 2026
• Tofler, “Airpay Payment Services Private Limited” (CIN U65100MH2012PTC229364, MCA-linked records), accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, “Airpay – Company Profile, Team, Funding, Competitors & Financials,” 2026
• MediaNama, “B2B payments company Airpay raises $3.6 million from Kalaari Capital,” March 2017
• Inc42, “Payments Startup Airpay Secures $3.67 Mn Series A From Kalaari And Others,” March 2017
• TechStory, “Mumbai-based Airpay Raises Rs 24cr Funding from Kalaari Capital, Others,” March 2017
• Whizsky, “Airpay: Founders, Funding, Business Model And Competitors,” accessed September 2026
• Business Standard, “Airpay gets RBI nod to operate as cross-border payment aggregator,” December 2025
• Entrackr, “airpay secures all three RBI payment-aggregator licences,” December 2025
• Airpay, “About Us / Company Overview” (company-stated reach and geographies), accessed September 2026
• CXOToday, “airpay strengthens NBFC sector with End-to-End Financial Solutions,” accessed September 2026
• Business Standard, “Big Bull bows out: Rakesh Jhunjhunwala passes away at 62,” August 2022
• IBS Intelligence, “Interview with Kunal Jhunjhunwala, Founder of airpay,” accessed September 2026
• Analytics Insight, interview with Kunal Jhunjhunwala on UPI transaction charges, accessed September 2026

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