Startup Deep Dive : Clix Capital — from a Rs 98.5 crore loss to a Rs 7,675 crore loan book

Clix Capital wrote off ₹291 crore ($30.3 million) of bad loans in FY22 and closed that year with a consolidated net loss of ₹98.5 crore, as per CARE Ratings’ assessment of the company’s financials — a hole most lending businesses take years to climb out of.

Three years later, the same non-banking financial company (NBFC) was managing a loan book of ₹7,675 crore as of September 2025, had just banked a fresh ₹220 crore top-up from its own promoters, and was borrowing from 46 lenders at a CARE A+ rating. This is the story of a hand-me-down from GE Capital’s Indian business that nearly stalled in the pandemic, then narrowed itself back to health.

Quick facts

What they do

Clix Capital is a Gurugram-headquartered NBFC that lends to small and mid-sized businesses, private schools and individuals who do not always fit neatly into a bank’s underwriting box. Its product shelf spans unsecured business loans (a large share partially covered by the government’s CGTMSE credit guarantee), loans against property, healthcare equipment finance for clinics and hospitals, and K-12 school financing — working-capital and expansion loans lent against a school’s fee receivables. Increasingly, Clix also lends alongside partners: it co-lends with banks such as Karnataka Bank through the Yubi platform, and digital lending apps including Moneyview source and service some of the customers whose loans sit on Clix’s own book, as described on the company’s website and in Outlook Business’s coverage of the Karnataka Bank tie-up (September 2025).

The origin

Clix Capital did not start as a startup pitch deck. It began in February 1994 as Countrywide Consumer Financial Services Private Limited, a captive lender GE Group used to finance consumer purchases, auto leases, corporate loans and healthcare equipment for its own products in India, and later traded as GE Money Financial Services, as per CARE Ratings’ company history. The founding insight came two decades later, when GE decided to exit commercial lending in India altogether. Rather than let a functioning loan book and an experienced underwriting team go to waste, Pramod Bhasin — the founder of Genpact and a former CEO of GE Capital India and Asia — teamed up with Anil Chawla, who had run GE Capital’s commercial business after earlier stints at Deloitte, Citibank and American Express, to buy the business out from under GE in a March 2016 management buy-in. The deal was funded chiefly by AION Capital Partners, at the time a joint venture between ICICI Venture and Apollo Global Management. GE exited as a shareholder in August 2016, the company was renamed Clix Capital Services, and a sister entity — CLIX Finance India, formerly GE Capital Services India — became a wholly owned subsidiary that September before being merged into Clix in March 2022 (CARE Ratings).

The struggle years

The new owners had barely finished integrating a legacy GE loan book when the COVID-19 pandemic hit India’s small-business and salaried borrowers hardest — precisely the customers Clix was leaning into. Collections weakened, restructured accounts piled up, and the loan book shrank for two straight years even as the company kept lending capital flowing in from its promoters to absorb the damage. The unsoftened numbers, all as reported by CARE Ratings:

• 31 March 2020: consolidated assets under management (AUM) at ₹4,769 crore, before the pandemic’s impact showed up in the books.
• 31 March 2021: AUM down to ₹4,142 crore; gross non-performing assets (GNPA) at 3.5%, as the first COVID waves squeezed collections.
• 31 March 2022: AUM down further to ₹3,660 crore — a two-year contraction of roughly 23% — and GNPA up sharply to 4.95%, as India’s second COVID wave hit salaried, self-employed and corporate borrowers alike.
• Same period: the corporate loan book, a legacy of the old GE portfolio, was deliberately wound down from ₹1,258 crore (March 2020) to just ₹248 crore (March 2022), since it no longer fit a business trying to become a retail and MSME lender.
• FY22: ₹291 crore ($30.3 million) written off against the one-time-restructured (OTR) loan book, driving a consolidated net loss of ₹98.5 crore and a return on total assets (ROTA) of -1.9%.

The turning point

The turn came in FY23. Collection efficiency improved as the macro-economic picture normalised, and GNPA fell from 4.95% as of March 2022 to 2.38% as of March 2023 — a swing CARE Ratings attributed to write-offs already taken plus a genuine improvement in the health of the restructured book. AUM growth resumed too, up 20% year-on-year to ₹4,375 crore, with the “core book” (excluding the wind-down corporate portfolio) growing a sharper 30%. On the profit line, the company swung from a ₹98.5 crore consolidated loss in FY22 to a ₹28.3 crore consolidated profit in FY23 — ₹49 crore if a one-time exceptional item is excluded — with ROTA moving from -1.9% to 0.5% (CARE Ratings). None of this would have been possible without patient capital: Clix’s promoters had already put in ₹200 crore in FY20 and a further ₹50 crore in FY21, keeping standalone capital adequacy above 35% through the worst of the losses and buying the company time to write off its problem loans without breaching regulatory capital norms.

The money behind it

• March 2016: management buy-in of GE Capital’s Indian commercial lending and leasing business by Pramod Bhasin and Anil Chawla, funded chiefly by AION Capital Partners, then a joint venture between ICICI Venture and Apollo Global Management (CARE Ratings).
• FY20: ₹200 crore equity infusion from AION Capital and the founders, part of what CARE Ratings calls a “long track record of equity support from promoters.”
• FY21: a further ₹50 crore equity infusion from the same shareholder group, as the pandemic weighed on the loan book.
• June 2020: ICICI Venture exits the AION Capital joint venture; Apollo Global Management becomes the sole 85% shareholder of AION Capital, and by extension of Clix (CARE Ratings).
• FY25 (announced August 2024): ₹220 crore raised from existing shareholders — Apollo Global Management, Pramod Bhasin and Anil Chawla — in their existing proportion, earmarked for MSME, education and healthcare-equipment lending and for AI/ML investment, as reported by Inc42 and confirmed in CARE Ratings’ January 2026 rationale.
• Current ownership (as of CARE Ratings’ January 2026 report): Plutus Wealth Management, Mauritius, holds 100% of Clix Capital on a consolidated basis; within that, Apollo Global Management is the majority shareholder with 85%, and founders Bhasin and Chawla hold the remaining 15%.

Clix has never disclosed an external equity valuation, and no single, corroborated figure for total capital raised across its life is publicly available — third-party trackers vary widely on that number, so it is left out here rather than guessed at. What is verifiable is that the company now funds its balance sheet mainly through rated wholesale debt rather than fresh equity rounds: term loans, non-convertible debentures (NCDs) and commercial paper carrying a CARE A+ / CARE A1+ rating, reaffirmed as recently as January 2026.

How it makes money

Like any NBFC, Clix borrows wholesale and re-lends at a margin. The mechanics, per CARE Ratings’ January 2026 rating rationale unless stated otherwise:

• Loan book: consolidated AUM of ₹7,675 crore as of 30 September 2025, up from ₹5,792 crore a year earlier — the base on which interest income is earned.
• Margin under pressure: net interest margin (NIM) narrowed to 5.55% (annualised) in H1FY26 from 6.19% in FY24, as the mix shifted toward lower-yielding secured products such as loan against property and K-12 financing.
• Funding mix (on-book, as of 30 September 2025): term loans 75%, non-convertible debentures 12%, pass-through certificates 9%, working capital demand loans 2%, commercial paper 1% — spread across relationships with 46 lenders including banks, other NBFCs and domestic financial institutions.
• Off-book growth: ₹1,411 crore of AUM as of September 2025 (up from ₹854 crore in March 2024) sits off Clix’s own balance sheet, originated through co-lending and direct-assignment deals — Clix earns a fee and a spread for origination and servicing without carrying the full asset.
• Sourcing partnerships: fintech apps such as Moneyview source and service some borrowers while the loan itself is booked on Clix’s balance sheet; Karnataka Bank co-lends on MSME loans through the Yubi platform (Outlook Business, September 2025).
• The part people get wrong: a growing loan book does not automatically mean growing profitability here. Return on total tangible assets (RoTA) actually fell to 0.83% (annualised) in H1FY26 from 1.05% in FY24, even as AUM grew — because NIM compression and higher provisioning in specific segments ate into the gains from scale.

The numbers

Consolidated total income and profit after tax (PAT), in ₹ crore, as reported by CARE Ratings:

• H1FY26 (April–September 2025, unaudited, consolidated): total income ₹559 crore, PAT ₹30 crore (CARE Ratings, January 2026).
• Capital adequacy ratio (CAR), a measure of buffer against losses, stayed comfortable throughout: 28.97% (FY24), 27.93% (FY25) and 28.76% (September 2025), consolidated.
• Tangible net worth grew from ₹1,550 crore (March 2024) to ₹1,891 crore (March 2025) to ₹1,932 crore (September 2025), helped by the FY25 equity infusion.
• Return on net worth (RoNW) moved from 4.03% in FY24 to 3.13% in FY25 and stayed at 3.13% (annualised) in H1FY26 — profit is growing in absolute terms, but not yet outrunning the capital base.

Where the money comes from

Clix’s loan book breaks down by product as follows, as of 30 September 2025, consolidated (CARE Ratings, January 2026):

• Unsecured business/MSME loans: 33% of AUM — partially covered by the CGTMSE credit guarantee scheme.
• K-12 / school financing: 27% of AUM — up from 20% as of March 2024, and the single biggest driver of AUM growth in FY25 and H1FY26.
• Loan against property (secured): 17% of AUM.
• Lending through partnership/fintech platforms: 16% of AUM.
• Healthcare equipment finance: 6% of AUM.
• Other products: 1% of AUM.

The surprise is which segment is actually pulling the loan book forward. Clix built its early reputation on end-to-end digital, “tech-platform” lending — as of March 2023 this was still its single largest segment, at ₹1,740 crore, per CARE Ratings’ 2023 rationale. That segment has since grown only slowly. Instead, it is K-12 school financing — lending against the unglamorous, predictable cash flows of private-school fee collections — that has nearly tripled its share of the book in under two years and is now the growth engine, with CARE Ratings describing Clix as “amongst leading NBFCs” in that niche. Geographically, the company lends out of Delhi NCR and roughly 20 other Indian cities including Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune and Chennai, per its own website.

The risks

• Asset-quality drift in healthcare finance: standalone GNPA rose from 1.79% (March 2024) to 1.91% (March 2025) to 2.12% (September 2025), which CARE Ratings attributes specifically to “higher delinquencies in the healthcare finance (HFS) segment.” The company wrote off ₹80 crore in FY25 and a further ₹53 crore in H1FY26 (standalone). CARE flags GNPA crossing 3% as a trigger for a rating downgrade.
• Margin compression from the pivot to secured lending: NIM fell from 6.19% (FY24) to 5.80% (FY25) to 5.55% annualised (H1FY26), and RoTA fell to 0.83% annualised in H1FY26 from 1.05% in FY24. CARE Ratings explicitly names “weakening profitability with RoTA below 1% on a sustained basis” as a factor that could trigger a downgrade.
• Moderate scale against larger rivals: even after 26% AUM growth in FY25, CARE Ratings notes Clix’s “market share across the product categories remains moderate.” It competes for the same MSME and school-finance borrowers as larger, better-capitalised NBFCs and banks, while running an on-book gearing of 2.50x as of September 2025 — comfortable today, but a rating-sensitive metric if it climbs past 4x or if fresh bank sanctions slow.

The takeaway

Clix Capital’s recovery did not come from a new idea. It came from cutting an old one. The corporate lending book it inherited from GE never fit a company trying to become a small-business and retail lender, and shrinking it from ₹1,258 crore to ₹248 crore in two years was as much a survival tactic as a strategy. What followed was not a pivot to something exciting, but a retreat into two comparatively boring, secured niches — school fee receivables and property-backed loans — that grow slower and carry lower headline margins, but bleed less in a downturn. For a lender that had just posted a ₹98.5 crore loss, boring was the point: patient promoter capital bought time, and a narrower business bought back the return on assets, one percentage point at a time.

Frequently asked questions

What does Clix Capital do?

Clix Capital is an NBFC that lends to MSMEs, private schools and individuals through unsecured business loans, K-12 school financing, loans against property and healthcare equipment finance, both directly and through co-lending and fintech partnerships.

Who owns Clix Capital?

As of CARE Ratings’ January 2026 report, Plutus Wealth Management, Mauritius, holds 100% of Clix Capital on a consolidated basis. Within that structure, Apollo Global Management is the majority shareholder with 85%, and founders Pramod Bhasin and Anil Chawla hold the remaining 15%.

Is Clix Capital profitable?

Yes, currently. After a consolidated net loss of ₹98.5 crore in FY22, Clix returned to profit in FY23 and reported a consolidated PAT of ₹61 crore in FY24 and ₹78 crore in FY25, with ₹30 crore in the first half of FY26 (CARE Ratings).

Is Clix Capital listed on the stock exchange?

No. Clix Capital’s equity is privately held. It does raise money through the debt markets — its non-convertible debentures and commercial paper are rated (CARE A+ / CARE A1+ as of January 2026) and privately placed, but it has not listed shares or announced IPO plans.

What happened to Clix Capital during the COVID-19 pandemic?

Its loan book contracted for two straight years, from ₹4,769 crore (March 2020) to ₹3,660 crore (March 2022), while gross NPAs rose to 4.95% and the company wrote off ₹291 crore on its restructured book, posting a ₹98.5 crore net loss in FY22 before recovering in FY23 (CARE Ratings).

Sources

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

• CARE Ratings (CareEdge Ratings), “CLIX Capital Services Private Limited” press release, 20 January 2026.
• CARE Ratings, “CLIX Capital Services Private Limited” press release, 27 June 2023.
• Inc42, “Clix Capital Bags INR 220 Cr To Expand Its MSME Lending Play,” August 2024.
• Clix Capital, company “About” page, accessed September 2026.
• PeopleMatters, “Rakesh Kaul takes over as Clix Capital’s CEO,” August 2021.
• Outlook Business, “Karnataka Bank, Clix Capital Enter Into A Co-Lending Partnership Through Yubi Platform,” September 2025.
• Trading Economics, USD/INR exchange rate, 18 September 2026.

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