In February 2025, Krafton — the South Korean gaming company behind PUBG — led a $53 million round that valued Cashfree Payments at $700 million (₹6,720 crore, converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026, Trading Economics), nearly 3.5 times what the company was worth a year earlier, as per TechCrunch, February 2025. Eighteen months later, the fiscal year that followed showed something less flattering next to that number: Cashfree closed FY26 with revenue of ₹967.4 crore, up 51% year on year, and still lost ₹118.5 crore doing it, as reported by Entrackr, August 2026.
That gap — a valuation that keeps climbing while the bottom line stays red eleven years after founding — is the story of Cashfree. It is also the story of what happens to a payments company when its business is only as stable as its licence. In December 2022, the Reserve Bank of India ordered Cashfree, along with Razorpay and Stripe, to stop onboarding new merchants pending a compliance audit. Growth flatlined for a year. The recovery since — revenue jumping past ₹960 crore and losses narrowing 23% in FY26 — is the part of the story worth slowing down for.
Quick facts
| Company | Cashfree Payments (Cashfree Payments India Private Limited) |
| Founded | September 2015, Bengaluru |
| Founders | Akash Sinha and Reeju Datta |
| Businesses | Payment gateway, payouts (B2C disbursals), cross-border payment aggregation, prepaid payment instruments, fraud and identity verification tools |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹967.4 crore (FY26, year ended March 2026) |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Net loss of ₹118.5 crore (FY26) |
| Listed | Private; reported to be targeting an IPO within about three years |
| Market value / last valuation | $700 million, as of the February 2025 Series C round |
| Key shareholders | Founders Akash Sinha and Reeju Datta; investors include Y Combinator, Apis Partners, State Bank of India, Smilegate and Krafton |
What they do
Cashfree Payments is a Bengaluru-based fintech that lets businesses move money in both directions. On one side, it runs a payment gateway that online and offline merchants plug into to accept cards, UPI, net banking and wallets at checkout. On the other, it runs a payouts product that lets businesses send money out — salaries, vendor payments, refunds, gig-worker earnings, insurance claims — in bulk, instantly, through an API instead of a bank’s manual disbursal desk. It has since added cross-border payment aggregation, prepaid payment instruments and fraud and identity verification tools built on top of the same rails. Its customers span e-commerce and quick commerce (Zomato, Swiggy, Zepto), fintech and lending (Cred, Bajaj Finance, Acko), and travel and mobility, and the company says it serves more than 300,000 businesses moving roughly $80 billion a year, as per TechCrunch, February 2025.
The origin
Akash Sinha and Reeju Datta met in mid-2015 while separately looking for a co-founder. Akash had worked as a software engineer at Amazon and BankBazaar; Reeju is an IIT Kharagpur graduate. Neither of their original ideas — Akash’s chat-based product, Reeju’s routing and logistics concept — survived first contact with the market. What did survive was a smaller, sharper observation: hyperlocal commerce in Bengaluru, especially food delivery, ran almost entirely on cash on delivery, and cash was a mess to collect, reconcile and hand back in refunds, particularly for orders placed late at night, as per StartupTalky, December 2024.
Their first product was not a payment gateway at all. It was a way to digitise cash on delivery: a customer would get a payment link after placing an order, pay by card or wallet before the delivery executive arrived, and the merchant would get an SMS confirmation instead of a fistful of notes to count. Cashfree signed up close to 300 offline stores in Bengaluru on that idea. The pivot came from the merchants themselves — several of the same stores that used the cash-on-delivery tool asked Cashfree to process payments on their websites too. By April 2016, Cashfree had rebuilt itself as an online payment gateway, the business it is still primarily known for a decade later, as per StartupTalky, December 2024.
The struggle years
Cashfree’s first real test was not financial distress — it was a regulator’s signature. In December 2022, the RBI directed Cashfree, Razorpay and Stripe to stop onboarding any new merchants until each company’s payment aggregator compliance was audited and approved, as reported by Business Standard and YourStory, December 2022. For a payments company, new merchants are the growth engine; Cashfree could keep serving existing clients but could not sign a single new one for the better part of a year. The numbers show exactly what that cost: net loss went from ₹2.9 crore in FY22 to ₹133.1 crore in FY23 — a roughly 46-fold jump — even as revenue from operations grew 75.4% to ₹613.8 crore, because employee costs (up 107.5% to ₹198.4 crore) and payment processing charges (up 114.4% to ₹445.5 crore) kept climbing to serve existing volume while the onboarding pipeline that would have paid for that cost base sat frozen, as per Inc42, January 2024. The company responded with layoffs affecting an estimated 6-8% of its headcount in early 2023, according to the same Inc42 reporting.
The freeze dragged into the following year too. FY24 revenue crept up just 4.7%, to ₹642.7 crore from ₹613.8 crore in FY23, with the loss holding near ₹135 crore — a year Entrackr’s own reporting attributes directly to the RBI’s merchant-onboarding ban, as per Entrackr, November 2024. Two setbacks, months apart in the calendar but compounding in effect: a product pivot forced by a failed first idea in 2016, and a regulator-imposed growth freeze from December 2022 that took a full year to lift and cost the company two fiscal years of stalled top-line growth.
The turning point
The single event that changed Cashfree’s trajectory was 19 December 2023, when the RBI granted Cashfree — alongside Razorpay, Open Money and EnKash — its final Payment Aggregator licence. The company said it could immediately resume onboarding an estimated 20,000 merchants that had been waiting in its pipeline, as reported by Business Today, December 2023. Seven months later, in July 2024, Cashfree became one of the first non-bank entities to receive the RBI’s Payment Aggregator-Cross Border (PA-CB) licence, opening a second, entirely new revenue line in cross-border payments, as per Business Standard, July 2024.
The before-and-after is visible directly in the filings. Before: FY24 revenue growth of 4.7%, with the company locked out of new merchant acquisition for roughly half the fiscal year. After: FY26 revenue of ₹967.4 crore, up 51.1% on FY25’s ₹640.1 crore, with net loss narrowing 23% to ₹118.5 crore from ₹154.1 crore and a brand-new cross-border commission line contributing ₹8 crore in its first full year, as per Entrackr, August 2026, and Inc42, August 2026. A licence that took a year to arrive is, on the numbers, the difference between a company that grew 4.7% and one that grew 51%.
The money behind it
Cashfree’s funding shape is unusually accelerator-heavy for a company now valued at $700 million. Y Combinator backed it with $120,000 in a pre-seed round in August 2017 and stayed on through subsequent rounds, giving the founders an early US network and a credibility stamp that mattered before Cashfree had a single large Indian institutional backer, as per StartupTalky, December 2024. Apis Partners’ Apis Growth Fund II led a $35.3 million Series B in November 2020, the round that funded Cashfree’s expansion beyond its original payment-gateway product into payouts at scale. In June 2021, State Bank of India — India’s largest lender — took an undisclosed, sub-5% stake, a rare instance of a public-sector bank investing directly in a payments fintech rather than only partnering commercially with one, as per Business Standard, June 2021.
The most consequential round came in February 2025: a $53 million Series C led by Krafton, the Korean gaming company, with existing investor Apis Growth Fund II also participating, valuing Cashfree at $700 million — up from roughly $208 million a year earlier, as per TechCrunch, February 2025, corroborated by DealStreetAsia and FinTech Futures reporting from the same week. Krafton’s rationale was strategic as much as financial: the two companies discussed payment-processing partnerships for gaming platforms, and Krafton has now committed close to $200 million across its broader India start-up portfolio. Cashfree earmarked the funds for expansion into the Middle East — UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait — with founder and CEO Akash Sinha telling TechCrunch, “MENA is large enough. We want to be a leader in this market.” Across all rounds, Cashfree has raised close to $95-100 million, per Entrackr’s August 2026 reporting and TechCrunch’s February 2025 figure respectively — a modest total next to Razorpay’s roughly $740 million raised, which makes the $700 million valuation notable for how little equity capital it took to get there.
How it makes money
Cashfree earns money the way most payment aggregators do: a commission on every transaction that passes through its gateway, historically pitched in the 1.75-3% range depending on payment method and merchant volume, as per StartupTalky, December 2024. That commission is the overwhelming majority of revenue — ₹889.7 crore of the company’s ₹967.4 crore in operating revenue in FY26, or 92%, as per Inc42, August 2026. Payouts, the product Cashfree is arguably best known for among fintech insiders and which it says commands more than half the market for payment disbursals in India, brought in a comparatively small ₹69.4 crore, about 7% of revenue. The new cross-border line added ₹8 crore.
The part people tend to get wrong is assuming a gateway business is high margin because it looks like software. It is not. Payment gateway processing charges — the cost of routing a transaction through card networks, UPI rails and issuing banks — were ₹697.6 crore in FY26 against ₹889.7 crore of gateway commission revenue, meaning a large share of every rupee collected is immediately paid back out to the rails Cashfree sits on top of. That cost line has consistently run at 64-73% of total expenses across the four fiscal years on record. Because Razorpay, PayU and PhonePe all compete on price for the same enterprise merchants, Cashfree cannot simply raise its take rate to fix the margin; the only two levers left are transaction volume and controlling everything else — chiefly employee costs, which actually declined slightly in FY26 to ₹239 crore from ₹243.4 crore in FY25 even as revenue grew 51%.
The numbers
Figures below are from Cashfree Payments India Private Limited’s standalone/consolidated financial filings as reported by Inc42 and Entrackr; all amounts in ₹ crore.
| Fiscal year | Revenue from operations | Net profit/(loss) |
|---|---|---|
| FY23 (year ended March 2023) | 613.8 | (133.1) |
| FY24 (year ended March 2024) | 642.7 | (135.0) |
| FY25 (year ended March 2025) | 640.1 | (154.1) |
| FY26 (year ended March 2026) | 967.4 | (118.5) |
For context, FY22 revenue was ₹349.9 crore against a comparatively small net loss of ₹2.9 crore — the base year before the RBI onboarding freeze reshaped the company’s cost structure, as per Inc42, January 2024. EBITDA loss narrowed from ₹132 crore in FY25 (margin of -20.6%) to ₹90.5 crore in FY26 (margin of -9.4%), as per Entrackr, October 2025 and August 2026. Cash and bank balance stood at ₹22 crore against total current assets of ₹1,891 crore at the end of FY26, as per Entrackr, August 2026.
Where the money comes from
Segment by segment, FY26 operating revenue broke down as: payment gateway commissions, ₹889.7 crore (92%); payout commissions, ₹69.4 crore (7%); and cross-border payment commissions, ₹8 crore (1%, its first year of contribution), as per Inc42 and Entrackr, August 2026. The surprise is less about which segment leads — the gateway obviously does — and more about how small payouts looks on the income statement relative to how central it is to Cashfree’s identity and its claimed market leadership in disbursals. The business the company is best known for inside fintech circles is not the one paying the bills; the plain-vanilla checkout gateway is. Cross-border, the newest and currently the smallest line at just ₹8 crore, is also the one the company is betting its next phase of growth on: a May 2026 report said Cashfree was pursuing a Series D of more than $100 million partly to fund cross-border expansion, with that segment projected to eventually account for close to a quarter of total revenue, as reported by fundsforNGOs News, May 2026 — a claim from a single, syndicated report that has not been independently corroborated elsewhere and should be read with that caveat.
The risks
Three risks stand out, each with a documented mechanism rather than a hypothetical one. First, regulatory concentration: Cashfree operates on RBI-issued authorisations — Payment Aggregator, Payment Aggregator-Cross Border, and Prepaid Payment Instrument licences — and the December 2022 onboarding freeze already showed what a single directive can do to growth and losses in real time. There is no reason a future audit or policy shift could not repeat that shock, and Cashfree’s international ambitions add foreign regulators to that list rather than removing the domestic one. Second, margin structure: payment gateway processing costs have consumed 64-73% of total revenue in every fiscal year on record, and with Razorpay, PayU and PhonePe all pricing aggressively for the same enterprise accounts, Cashfree has limited room to raise its take rate to protect margin — profitability has to come from scale and cost discipline instead. Third, continued cash burn against a thin liquidity cushion: despite ₹967.4 crore of revenue in FY26, Cashfree still lost ₹118.5 crore, and its cash and bank balance of ₹22 crore is small next to ₹1,090.9 crore of annual expenses, which is part of why the company is reportedly seeking a fresh, large private round before any IPO rather than funding its FY27 profitability target purely from operations.
The takeaway
The lesson in Cashfree’s numbers is not “regulation is a risk” in the abstract — every payments company already knows that. It is narrower and more useful: when your entire growth engine depends on a single approval you do not control, the honest response is to build a second and third revenue line before you need them, not after. Cashfree spent 2016 to 2022 as, functionally, one product — a payment gateway — and paid for that concentration in a single December when a regulator’s letter erased a year of new-customer growth overnight. The payouts business it had already built softened that blow only partially, because it was still small. The cross-border line it launched in 2024, arriving two years after the freeze rather than two years before it, is now the company’s fastest-growing bet precisely because it does not depend on the same licence that once stopped everything else. Diversify the thing a regulator can switch off before you are forced to, not after.
Frequently asked questions
Who founded Cashfree Payments and when?
Akash Sinha and Reeju Datta founded Cashfree in Bengaluru in September 2015, initially to digitise cash-on-delivery payments for hyperlocal offline merchants before pivoting to an online payment gateway by April 2016, as per StartupTalky, December 2024.
What does Cashfree Payments actually do?
It runs a payment gateway for businesses to accept payments and a payouts product for businesses to send money out in bulk — salaries, refunds, vendor payments and gig-worker earnings — plus newer cross-border payment aggregation, prepaid instrument and fraud-verification tools.
Is Cashfree Payments profitable?
No. Cashfree reported a net loss in every fiscal year from FY23 through FY26, most recently ₹118.5 crore on ₹967.4 crore of revenue in FY26, though the loss narrowed 23% from FY25 and the company has said it is targeting full-year EBITDA profitability in FY27, as per Entrackr, August 2026.
How much is Cashfree Payments worth?
Investors valued Cashfree at $700 million in its February 2025 Series C round led by Krafton, up from roughly $208 million a year earlier, as per TechCrunch, February 2025, a figure corroborated by DealStreetAsia’s contemporaneous reporting.
Is Cashfree Payments planning an IPO?
The company has been reported to be targeting a public listing within roughly three years and was said in May 2026 to be pursuing a Series D round of over $100 million as a likely final private round beforehand, though this account comes from a single syndicated report and has not been independently verified elsewhere, as per fundsforNGOs News, May 2026.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- StartupTalky, “Cashfree Growth Story,” December 2024
- Inc42, “Cashfree Payments’ Net Loss Widens 46X To INR 133.1 Cr In FY23,” January 2024
- Entrackr, “Cashfree posts Rs 643 Cr revenue and Rs 133 Cr loss in FY24,” November 2024
- Entrackr, “Cashfree posts Rs 640 Cr revenue in FY25, losses rise 14%,” October 2025
- Inc42, “Cashfree FY26: Revenue Inches Closer To ₹1,000 Cr Mark, Loss Narrows,” August 2026
- Entrackr, “Cashfree reports Rs 967 Cr revenue in FY26; losses narrow 23%,” August 2026
- TechCrunch, “Krafton leads Cashfree’s $53M funding at $700M valuation,” February 2025
- DealStreetAsia / FinTech Futures, reporting on the Krafton-led Series C round, February 2025
- Business Standard / YourStory, reporting on the RBI’s merchant-onboarding freeze on Cashfree, Razorpay and Stripe, December 2022
- Business Today, “Cashfree To Onboard 20,000 Merchants Following RBI’s Approval For Payment Aggregator License,” December 2023
- Business Standard, “Cashfree Payments gets payment aggregator-cross border licence from RBI,” July 2024
- Business Standard, “SBI invests undisclosed amount in digital payments startup Cashfree,” June 2021
- fundsforNGOs News, “Cashfree Payments Targets $100M+ Funding Round Ahead of IPO Plans,” May 2026
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