Startup Deep Dive : Avail Finance — sold to Ola for less than its last valuation

Avail Finance spent five years building an app-only lender for the one customer segment Indian banks would not touch: security guards, delivery riders, drivers and housekeeping staff with no payslip a credit bureau would recognise. In March 2022, Ola announced it would buy the company in an all-share deal reported at about $50 million (Entrackr; TechCrunch, both March 2022) — a price below the roughly ₹500 crore (~$68 million) valuation Avail Finance had carried since its own Series B round less than two years earlier.

That gap between what Avail Finance was once valued at and what it actually sold for is the spine of this piece: a founder who built the product from personal experience, a customer base whose income collapsed overnight in 2020, and an acquirer that happened to be run by the founder’s own brother.

Quick facts

What they do

Avail Finance built a mobile-only lending platform, often described in coverage as a neobank, aimed squarely at India’s blue-collar and gig workforce — security guards, delivery riders, drivers, factory hands and housekeeping staff earning a reported ₹8,000 to ₹35,000 a month, a segment largely shut out of mainstream bank credit for lacking payslips, a credit bureau file, or collateral (multiple 2019 reports on the company’s target segment). It offered collateral-free personal loans and salary advances, typically in the ₹5,000 to ₹20,000 range, alongside savings products, and distributed much of this through partnerships with employers of blue-collar labour, including Ola, Swiggy, Ecom Express and Quess Corp, rather than through open-market customer acquisition alone.

The origin

Ankush Aggarwal’s founding insight did not come from a spreadsheet. Before starting Avail Finance, he worked on Ola’s auto-rickshaw hailing business, Ola Auto, a launch that required the team to speak with hundreds of auto drivers across the city. The same complaint kept surfacing in those conversations: drivers could not get a loan from a bank, not because they would not repay one, but because they had no payslip, no long banking history and no credit score a lender recognised. It was a well-documented gap in Indian finance — banks and NBFCs had long underwritten the salaried middle class and largely ignored gig and blue-collar earners — but Aggarwal treated it as a product problem rather than a policy one. He co-founded Avail Finance in February 2017 with Tushar Mehndiratta, betting that a mobile app could do the underwriting work a branch never would: build a lender and a credit history for a worker who had neither, together, from scratch.

The struggle years

The company did not arrive at a working model on its first attempt, and its hardest year did not come from a product mistake at all.

• Avail Finance launched as a pure lending app, then by 2018-2019 the founders concluded the segment needed a broader financial platform rather than credit alone, expanding into salary advances and savings products distributed through employer tie-ups.
• As late as 2019, two years after founding, the company was still describing its near-term ambition as disbursing 50,000 loans and building a ₹100 crore loan book — a modest scale that shows how slowly blue-collar underwriting had to be built, loan by loan, rather than scaled the way consumer apps usually are.
• The lockdown of March-April 2020 hit Avail Finance’s entire customer base at once: gig and blue-collar income collapsed overnight when India shut down. On 31 March 2020, Avail Finance partnered with Ola to run “Ola Sahyog,” disbursing interest-free credit of up to ₹1,200 a week for three weeks — ₹3,600 in total per driver — to more than 100,000 driver-partner families, recoverable only once earnings resumed (Ola Cabs press release, 31 March 2020).
• That crisis-lending period shows up directly in the books: revenue fell from ₹5.59 crore in FY20 to ₹4.48 crore in FY21, a 20% decline, even as the company kept extending credit into the segment hit hardest by the lockdown (Entrackr, regulatory filings report, 2021).

The turning point

The defining event was not a product launch but a sale. On 24 March 2022, Ola announced it had agreed to acquire Avail Finance in an all-share swap, a deal two independent reports — Entrackr and TechCrunch, both dated 24-25 March 2022 — put at roughly $50 million. Set that beside where Avail Finance had stood less than two years earlier: its Series B in August 2020 priced the company at about ₹500 crore, or roughly $68 million (Inc42, Entrackr, August 2020), and TechCrunch’s acquisition-week reporting cited a last-known valuation as high as $86.6 million. Whichever figure is the more accurate ceiling, the acquisition price landed below it — a down round wearing the language of an exit. Ola was not a stranger to the cap table either: it already held about a 9% stake in Avail Finance from an investment made in 2019, and Ola co-founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal is Ankush Aggarwal’s brother (Entrackr, March 2022; Inc42, April 2022) — a related-party dimension that made this less a competitive sale than a family consolidation.

The money behind it

• Early round (reported as September 2017 by CB Insights; other trackers place the close by March 2018): $17.2 million led by Matrix Partners India, joined by angel checks from Ola co-founders Bhavish Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati, Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal, Freecharge and CRED founder Kunal Shah, and Mswipe founder Manish Patel.
• Series A — June 2019: $9 million led by Matrix Partners India (YourStory, June 2019; Z47/Matrix news release).
• Series B — August 2020: ₹87 crore (~$11.8 million) led by Falcon Edge-managed Alphawave Incubation, with existing investor Matrix Partners also participating; the round valued the company at roughly ₹500 crore (~$68 million). Alphawave put in about ₹57 crore for an 11.5% stake and Matrix added ₹30.2 crore, taking its holding to 26.4% (Inc42, Entrackr, August 2020). Tracxn’s filings record a Series B closing as late as 14 June 2021, suggesting the round was completed in more than one tranche.
• Venture debt — May 2021: about $3.24-4.5 million drawn from Alteria Capital (TechCrunch, March 2022).
• Strategic stake: Ola invested for roughly 9% of Avail Finance in 2019, three years ahead of buying the rest of the company outright.
• Total raised before acquisition: roughly $38-41 million across seven to nine rounds from about ten investors — TechCrunch and Tracxn put the figure at $38.5 million, CB Insights at $41.15 million.

What each backer changed: Matrix Partners’ early conviction (2017 and again in 2019 and 2020) kept the company funded through three rounds and gave it the single largest institutional stake at 26.4% after the Series B; Alpha Wave’s Series B cheque set the ₹500 crore valuation bar the eventual Ola deal would fall short of; and Ola’s 2019 minority stake was the toehold that turned into a full acquisition three years later.

How it makes money

• Core revenue line: interest and fee income earned on short-tenure personal loans and salary advances, generally sized between ₹5,000 and ₹20,000 per loan (Entrackr, March 2022; Inc42, April 2022 — the two reports differ slightly on the exact band).
• Distribution ran largely through employer partnerships — Ola, Swiggy, Ecom Express and Quess Corp among them — letting Avail Finance underwrite off payroll and attendance data from the employer rather than a traditional credit bureau file, the workaround for a segment with thin or no CIBIL history.
• Neither the company nor the trackers covering it have published a take rate, processing-fee percentage or net interest margin; that is a genuine gap in the public record, and this piece does not assign a figure to fill it.
• The part people get wrong: lending to blue-collar borrowers is often assumed to be high-risk, high-margin “subprime” business. Avail Finance’s own numbers argue against the margin half of that story — revenue stayed in the single-digit crores for years (₹4.48 crore to ₹11.9 crore across FY21-FY23) even as the company kept raising external capital, a profile closer to a subsidised customer-acquisition-and-underwriting business than a high-margin lender.

The numbers

Public filings, as reported by Entrackr and Inc42, show a revenue line that never scaled past single-digit crores and then fell off a cliff after the Ola integration:

• FY20 revenue: ₹5.59 crore (Entrackr, regulatory filings report, 2021).
• FY21 revenue: ₹4.48 crore, down 20% year-on-year, coinciding with the pandemic-lockdown period (Entrackr, regulatory filings report, 2021).
• FY23 revenue: ₹11.9 crore, the highest disclosed figure in the available filings (Inc42 Financials, citing MCA filings).
• FY24 revenue: ₹0.62 crore, down 94.8% year-on-year, alongside a net loss of ₹23.7 crore (Inc42 Financials, citing MCA filings).
• FY22 — the year of the Ola acquisition — is not available in the filings reviewed for this piece and has been left out rather than estimated.

Where the money comes from

• Customer base: security guards, delivery riders, drivers, housekeeping staff and other gig and blue-collar workers, with a reported monthly income band of ₹8,000 to ₹35,000 (multiple 2019 reports on the company’s target segment).
• Channel split: distribution leaned on employer partnerships rather than open-market acquisition, with named tie-ups including Ola, Swiggy, Ecom Express and Quess Corp.
• Geography: Avail Finance operated out of Bengaluru and described itself as a pan-India digital platform; no city- or state-wise revenue split is available in the public record, so none is presented here.
• The surprise: two years after the Ola deal closed, revenue in the original Avail Finance entity had collapsed to ₹0.62 crore (FY24) from ₹11.9 crore (FY23) — a sign that lending activity migrated almost entirely into Ola Financial Services rather than continuing inside the acquired entity, making the “acquisition” look, in the numbers, closer to a wind-down of the standalone business than a merger of equals.

The risks

• Structural credit risk in the target segment: Avail Finance’s entire customer base was defined by lacking the credit history, payslips and collateral that conventional underwriting relies on, which is also what makes individual default risk hard to price without alternative data — a risk baked into the business model itself rather than a cyclical one.
• Losses funded by outside capital rather than margin: disclosed revenue never cleared single-digit crores in any year on record (₹4.48 crore to ₹11.9 crore, FY21-FY23) while the company raised roughly $38-41 million across seven-plus rounds, a funding stack that made the business dependent on continued investor support rather than its own economics (TechCrunch, Tracxn, CB Insights).
• Concentration in a narrow investor and distribution base: Matrix Partners and Alpha Wave together held roughly 38% of the company after the Series B (26.4% plus 11.5%, Inc42, Entrackr, August 2020), and much of the lending book was sourced through a handful of employer partnerships, so the loss of either a backer or a key employer relationship carried outsized weight.

The takeaway

Avail Finance proved something real: India’s blue-collar workforce would use formal credit if someone built the underwriting rails to reach it, and hundreds of thousands of workers took interest-free credit and salary advances through the platform during its hardest year. But proving demand is not the same as proving a lending business can carry its own losses. Revenue stayed thin for years, the company never disclosed a profit, and it ended up folded into the balance sheet of a much larger company — one run, as it happens, by the founder’s own brother — for a price below what its own investors had valued it at less than two years earlier. The lesson that travels beyond this one company: a genuine, well-documented gap in the market is a reason to start a lending business, not a guarantee that it will be able to fund itself once it exists.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded Avail Finance and when?

Ankush Aggarwal and Tushar Mehndiratta founded Avail Finance in Bengaluru in February 2017, building an app-only lending platform for India’s blue-collar workforce after Aggarwal encountered the credit gap firsthand while working on Ola’s auto-rickshaw business.

What kind of loans did Avail Finance offer?

Collateral-free personal loans and salary advances, generally in the ₹5,000 to ₹20,000 range, distributed largely through partnerships with employers of blue-collar and gig workers such as Ola, Swiggy, Ecom Express and Quess Corp.

Who acquired Avail Finance, and for how much?

Ola announced an all-share acquisition of Avail Finance on 24 March 2022, reported at about $50 million by Entrackr and TechCrunch — below the roughly ₹500 crore ($68 million) to $86.6 million valuation range the company had carried since its August 2020 Series B.

How much funding did Avail Finance raise before being acquired?

Roughly $38-41 million across seven to nine rounds from about ten investors, including Matrix Partners, Alpha Wave (formerly Falcon Edge) and venture debt from Alteria Capital, according to TechCrunch, CB Insights and Tracxn.

What happened to Avail Finance’s founder after the deal?

Ankush Aggarwal moved to head Ola Financial Services, the ride-hailing company’s financial-services arm, following the acquisition (Inc42, April 2022).

Sources

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

• Entrackr, “Ola to acquire Bhavish Aggarwal’s brother-led company Avail Finance,” March 2022
• TechCrunch, “Ola to acquire neobank Avail Finance,” March 2022
• Inc42, “Bhavish Agarwal’s Brother & Avail Finance Founder To Lead Ola Financial Post-Avail’s Acquisition,” April 2022
• Inc42 Financials Tracker, Avail Finance company page, accessed September 2026
• Entrackr, regulatory filings report on Avail Finance FY20-FY21 revenue, 2021
• Inc42, “Matrix Partners Lead $9Mn in Fintech Startup Avail Finance,” 2019
• YourStory, funding report on Avail Finance’s $9 million Series A, June 2019
• Inc42, “Avail Finance Bags $11.8 Mn From Falcon Edge-Led Alphawave, Matrix,” August 2020
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: Avail Finance raises $11.5 Mn round from Alphawave and Matrix,” August 2020
• Ola Cabs press release, “Ola ‘Sahyog’ brings interest-free micro-credit through Avail Finance to driver-partners,” 31 March 2020
• YourStory, “Ola set to acquire Avail Finance to double down on financial services,” March 2022
• CB Insights, Avail Finance company and financials profile, accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, Avail Finance company profile, accessed September 2026
• Trading Economics, USD/INR exchange rate, 18 September 2026

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