Startup Deep Dive : CredAble — it moves Rs 1,000 crore a month but earns just Rs 22 crore a year

CredAble has helped route roughly ₹1,000 crore worth of supplier invoices through its platform every month at its peak, yet the Mumbai fintech’s own revenue from all that activity was just ₹22.1 crore in the year to March 2025, down 23% from a year earlier (Inc42 financials, FY25). A company that touches a small city’s worth of working capital each month and still posts a ₹27.2 crore loss is not really in the business you would guess from the outside.

That gap between transaction volume and revenue is not a mistake in the numbers. It is the business model. CredAble was built to sit between big corporates and their small suppliers, moving other people’s money faster, and charging a fee for it rather than lending its own balance sheet on any real scale — until it started doing the opposite in 2022. This piece walks through how a company founded on a rejected discount request in a logistics business turned into one of India’s more closely watched supply-chain finance platforms, why it still loses money eight years in, and where that money actually comes from.

Quick facts

What they do

CredAble builds working-capital financing programmes for large corporates and then extends that financing down their supplier and dealer chains, so a small vendor who has shipped goods to a big anchor company can get paid early, at a rate priced off the anchor’s credit rating rather than the vendor’s own weaker one. On the other side of the same programme, the corporate itself can extend its own payment terms without squeezing its suppliers. The company runs this as a technology and risk-underwriting layer that connects banks, NBFCs and its own lending arm to corporates and their vendor networks, rather than as a single lender writing every cheque itself. As of June 2024, CredAble said it worked with more than 125 corporate customers and had financed over 350,000 small businesses through its programmes (Entrackr, June 2024).

The origin

The idea did not start in a boardroom. Ram Kewalramani was running a logistics company where his own receivables regularly stretched past 90 days while the vendors and drivers he depended on wanted paying every week. He tried the obvious fix: offer clients a cash discount for paying him early. The purchase departments said no, even though the same clients were parking their surplus cash in instruments yielding around 6% a year, far less than the discount he was offering them (Inc42, “How CredAble Is Using Tech To Become India’s Supply Chain Investment Bank”). The refusal was not about the money. It was about process, incentives and the fact that nobody inside a large company is rewarded for helping a vendor’s cash flow.

Kewalramani and Nirav Choksi, an entrepreneur who had already built and exited technology and commodities-trading businesses over roughly two decades, read that refusal as a market failure rather than a dead end. If a corporate would not pay early on its own initiative, a platform could do the arithmetic for it: borrow against the corporate’s own credit strength, pay the supplier early using that cheaper capital, and split the saving between the financier, the platform and the supplier. That reframing — decoupling a small supplier’s cost of capital from its own weak credit history and pricing it instead off the large buyer’s rating — became CredAble’s founding insight when the company launched in March 2017 with three employees (Inc42).

The struggle years

The first hurdle was not capital, it was patience. Enterprise sales cycles in supply-chain finance run long: getting a corporate’s ERP system to talk to a new financing platform originally took months per client, and CredAble had to prove the model one large anchor at a time before adoption started compounding through each anchor’s own vendor base (Inc42). By March 2018 the company had grown to just 12 employees, a year after launch, and its platform did not actually go live for customers until October 2018 — a year and a half after founding (Inc42).

The harder struggle shows up in the filings once the company had scaled. In the year to March 2023, CredAble’s revenue from operations grew 2.78 times to ₹13.94 crore from ₹4.92 crore in FY22 — healthy growth on paper. But its losses grew faster, surging 3.37 times to ₹22.40 crore in FY23 from ₹6.53 crore in FY22 (Entrackr, June 2024; Inc42). Two years later, in FY25, the company was still posting a net loss of ₹27.2 crore on revenue of ₹22.1 crore — a business that, eight years after founding, has yet to show a profitable year in its available filings (Inc42 financials). That is not a near-death spiral, but it is a persistent, widening gap between the volume the platform moves and the money it keeps, unsoftened by the growth story around it.

The turning point

The clearest inflection point in CredAble’s history is not a funding round, it is a bank buying in. In August 2022, Axis Bank announced it would acquire a stake of over 5% in CredAble for ₹55 crore (about $5.7 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0, 18 September 2026, Trading Economics), with the deal expected to close by that September (YourStory, August 2022; Business Standard, August 2022). Until then, CredAble had raised roughly $40 million across seed, Series A and Series B rounds and a 2020 bridge round, all from asset managers and family offices, while relying on banks and NBFCs as external financing partners for the programmes it built (Tracxn; Clay funding aggregator).

A scheduled commercial bank taking direct equity changed the register CredAble operated in. It signalled that a regulated lender was willing to underwrite CredAble’s risk models and processes well enough to become a shareholder, not just a financing counterparty on individual deals. Within roughly a year of that stake, CredAble’s own NBFC subsidiary, Equentia Financial Service Private Limited, was granted a non-deposit-taking NBFC licence by the Reserve Bank of India, letting the group lend directly to MSMEs and access debt markets on its own account rather than only arranging financing through partner banks and NBFCs (Uniindia). The company moved, in other words, from being purely an enabler of other people’s balance sheets to also being a balance sheet itself.

The money behind it

CredAble has raised more than $60 million across equity and debt rounds as of 2024-25, according to aggregated filings (Entrackr, June 2024; Clay funding aggregator). No round has come with a disclosed valuation (Clay; Tracxn, 2025), so any headline valuation figure circulating for the company should be treated as unconfirmed.

• Series A: $14.8 million (about ₹100 crore at then-prevailing rates), led by Alpha Capital, June 2018 (Inc42; Clay funding aggregator — the dollar and rupee figures cross-check against each other).
• Bridge round: undisclosed amount, October 2020, ahead of the larger Series B (Tracxn).
• Series B: $30 million, co-led by Plutus Wealth Management and existing investor Oaks Asset Management, October 2021 — earmarked for platform development and a new SME growth and credit product (TechGraph, October 2021).
• Strategic stake: Axis Bank agreed to buy over 5% of CredAble for ₹55 crore, announced August 2022, alongside further infusion from Oaks Asset Management (YourStory; Business Standard, August 2022).
• Series B extension: $9.4 million, November 2023 (Tracxn).
• Corporate round: $10 million from Singapore-based Equentia Natural Resources, March 2024 (Entrackr; ObserveNow Media, March 2024).
• Debt financing: ₹30 crore (about $3.6 million) from SIDBI, June 2024, to fund on-book MSME lending through Equentia (Entrackr, June 2024).
• Latest round: about $5 million, March 2025 (Tracxn).

Three backers stand out for what they specifically changed. Oaks Asset Management has been a repeat investor from the early rounds through the 2021 Series B and beyond, giving CredAble continuity of capital through its highest-loss years. Plutus Wealth Management co-led the $30 million Series B that funded the platform’s expansion into a broader SME credit product, the single largest infusion in the company’s history to date. Axis Bank’s 2022 stake brought something money alone could not: a scheduled bank’s underwriting comfort, which lined up with CredAble’s own move into direct NBFC lending soon after. SIDBI’s 2024 debt line added a policy-aligned, MSME-focused lender to the capital stack just as the NBFC arm needed on-balance-sheet debt to keep lending.

How it makes money

• Success-fee model on the core platform: CredAble has said it charges no upfront or registration fee to suppliers, earning instead a success fee when a financing transaction actually completes (Inc42).
• Yield income from its own book: since Equentia’s NBFC licence, CredAble also earns interest/yield by co-lending or lending directly to MSMEs rather than purely arranging third-party financing (Uniindia; Inc42).
• The take rate itself — the exact fee or spread CredAble keeps per transaction — has not been published in any filing or interview found for this piece, and is not stated here.
• The part people get wrong: the headline disbursement numbers (historically around ₹1,000 crore financed per month, per company statements cited by YourStory) describe capital that mostly belongs to partner banks and NBFCs passing through CredAble’s risk and technology layer, not CredAble’s own revenue. That is why a platform moving that much volume can still report annual revenue in the tens of crore, not hundreds.

The numbers

Figures below are from CredAble’s own filings as reported by Indian business media; unit is ₹ crore.

Sources: FY22 and FY23 figures from Entrackr’s reporting on CredAble’s MCA filings (June 2024); FY25 figures from Inc42’s financials tracker (2026), which also reports the FY25 revenue decline as 23% year-on-year and the FY25 loss decline as 19% year-on-year. A standalone FY24 figure could not be independently reconciled across sources and is omitted here rather than estimated.

Where the money comes from

• Customer base, June 2024: over 125 corporate anchor customers and more than 350,000 small-business borrowers financed cumulatively through CredAble’s programmes (Entrackr).
• Historical scale marker, circa 2021: CredAble said it had partnered with more than two dozen large corporations and served 7,000-plus vendors and dealers, processing an average of about ₹1,000 crore a month in disbursements (YourStory company profile) — a volume figure, not a revenue figure.
• Business-line split: two distinct engines sit inside the group — the asset-light platform business (fee income for arranging financing through bank and NBFC partners) and the NBFC business under Equentia (interest/yield income from co-lending and direct MSME loans since its RBI licence).
• Geography: reporting found for this piece describes an India-focused corporate and MSME customer base; no material disclosed international revenue split was found, so none is claimed here.
• The surprise: the disclosed operating revenue (₹22.1 crore in FY25) is small next to the disbursement volumes CredAble has described in the past, because most of the money moving through its programmes belongs to bank and NBFC partners, not to CredAble itself — the platform’s revenue is the fee and yield skimmed off that flow, not the flow.

The risks

• Regulatory and tax risk on co-lending: India’s GST fitment committee was reviewing in late 2024 whether co-lending arrangements between banks and NBFCs should attract an 18% GST charge, and the revenue department rejected a sector waiver request in early 2025 (Business Standard, November 2024 and February 2025). Since Equentia’s economics depend on co-lending with bank partners, a confirmed 18% levy would raise the cost of exactly the structure CredAble built after getting its NBFC licence.
• Concentration and correlated credit risk: because CredAble prices vendor financing off the credit strength of the anchor corporate rather than the vendor, a stumble at one large anchor does not stay contained — it can flow straight through to every small supplier whose financing was priced off that anchor’s rating, the same mechanism that makes the model work when anchors are healthy (Inc42).
• Sustained losses funding a growing loan book: CredAble has posted a loss in every year with disclosed financials — ₹6.53 crore (FY22), ₹22.40 crore (FY23) and ₹27.2 crore (FY25) — meaning continued access to fresh equity and debt, such as the SIDBI line raised in 2024, remains necessary to keep funding the NBFC’s lending growth rather than the business self-funding it (Entrackr; Inc42).

The takeaway

The lesson in CredAble’s numbers is not really about fintech. It is about what happens when a company’s core product is trust rather than capital. For most of its life, CredAble was not lending money so much as lending its judgement about who was creditworthy, and getting paid a sliver for being right often enough that banks and corporates kept using it. That is a genuinely useful business, but it is structurally a thin-margin one: the volume looks enormous, the revenue does not, and the two will keep looking mismatched for as long as the company is mostly a pipe rather than a tank. Getting an NBFC licence and putting some of its own capital to work was the logical next step once a bank was willing to sit on the cap table as proof the risk models held up. Any business built on arranging other people’s money before it dares lend its own should expect the same pattern: a long stretch where growth and profit point in opposite directions, resolved only once the company earns the right to hold more of the risk itself.

Frequently asked questions

What does CredAble actually do?

It builds supply-chain and working-capital financing programmes that let large corporates’ small suppliers get paid early, priced off the corporate’s own credit strength, using capital arranged from banks, NBFCs and, since 2023, CredAble’s own NBFC subsidiary Equentia.

Who founded CredAble and when?

Nirav Choksi and Ram Kewalramani founded CredAble in March 2017 in Mumbai, after Kewalramani experienced a working-capital squeeze first-hand while running a logistics company (Inc42).

Is CredAble profitable?

No. Available filings show losses every year, including ₹22.40 crore in FY23 and ₹27.2 crore in FY25, according to media reporting on its MCA filings (Entrackr; Inc42).

How much funding has CredAble raised, and at what valuation?

More than $60 million across equity and debt rounds as of 2024-25 (Entrackr; Clay funding aggregator). No round has come with a publicly disclosed valuation (Clay; Tracxn).

Who are CredAble’s key backers?

Oaks Asset Management and Plutus Wealth Management have been lead equity investors across multiple rounds, Axis Bank bought a strategic stake of over 5% in 2022, and SIDBI provided debt financing in 2024.

Sources

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

• Inc42, “How CredAble Is Using Tech To Become India’s Supply Chain Investment Bank And Keep Trade Flowing” (undated feature, accessed September 2026)
• Inc42, “Supply Chain Financing Startup CredAble Raises $14.8 Mn In Series A Funding From Alpha Capital” (2018)
• Inc42, CredAble Financials tracker, sourced to MCA filings (accessed September 2026)
• Entrackr, “CredAble raises Rs 30 Cr from SIDBI” (June 2024)
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: Fintech startup CredAble scores $10 Mn in new round” (March 2024)
• ObserveNow Media, “Fintech Startup CredAble Secures $10 Million in Fresh Funding” (March 2024)
• TechGraph, “Plutus Wealth & Oaks Asset leads $30 mn funding round for CredAble” (October 2021)
• YourStory, “Axis Bank to acquire over 5% stake in fintech startup CredAble” (August 2022)
• Business Standard, “Axis Bank to acquire over 5% stake in fintech platform CredAble for Rs 55 crore by September” (August 2022)
• YourStory, CredAble company profile (founder and scale statistics, accessed September 2026)
• Uniindia, “CredAble granted NBFC license by RBI” (Equentia Financial Service Private Limited)
• Tracxn, CredAble company and funding profile (accessed September 2026)
• Clay, CredAble funding dossier (accessed September 2026)
• Business Standard, “GST fitment panel to review 18% GST on co-lending activities” (November 2024)
• Business Standard, “Revenue department rejects panel’s GST waiver demand on co-lending” (February 2025)

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