Startup Deep Dive : Credit Fair — how a no-cost-EMI lender sold for a quarter of its peak value

In July 2026, a lender once valued at about ₹180 crore ($18.8 million) sold its core business for ₹45 crore, roughly a quarter of its peak paper value. The buyer was BlackSoil, the seller was Credit Fair, and the deal was a cash slump sale of the very business the company had spent two years betting its future on: rooftop solar loans.

The paradox is that Credit Fair was not failing at lending. Since 2018 it had disbursed more than ₹1,300 crore of no-cost and low-cost EMIs to over 3.5 lakh borrowers across 20-plus states, as reported by Inc42. What it ran out of was the one input a lender cannot manufacture from good behaviour: fresh capital. Founder Aditya Damani said plainly that the sale followed multiple failed attempts to raise equity and debt, and that for non-banking lenders with assets under management below ₹300 crore, the funding tap had effectively closed.

Quick facts

What they do

Credit Fair is a point-of-sale consumer lender. Instead of handing a borrower cash, it sits at the merchant’s checkout and turns a large one-time bill into monthly instalments, often at zero interest to the customer. The company operated a business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) model: it signed up merchants, and the merchant offered a Credit Fair EMI to close the sale. Over its life it lent against four kinds of purchases:

• Education fees and upskilling courses (early merchant partners included upGrad and Toppr, per StartupTalky).
• Healthcare and elective medical procedures.
• Home improvement and decor (partners included Asian Paints).
• Electric vehicles and, from around 2023, rooftop solar systems (partners included Ampere).

By the time of the 2026 sale, rooftop solar had become the flagship: the acquired book alone financed roughly 80 MW of distributed capacity and had helped over 8,000 customers install rooftop solar, as stated by the company and BlackSoil.

The origin

Aditya Damani did not start as an Indian fintech founder. He took an MBA at London Business School, then worked at Oakam, a UK lender built specifically for people with thin or no credit files, where he picked up a banking-technology award. Before that he had sat closer to the plumbing of global finance, including a stretch at PIMCO in the United States, and he had advised private-equity funds on setting up lending businesses in India.

The founding insight came from a gap he kept seeing at home. India had hundreds of millions of adults who were creditworthy in every practical sense but invisible to formal lenders because they had no borrowing history. When a real need arrived, a college admission, a medical bill, they were pushed toward informal lenders charging as much as 10% a month. Damani’s bet, made when he incorporated the business in Mumbai in 2018, was that if you met people at the moment of a specific, productive purchase and let the merchant subsidise the interest, you could underwrite the customer far more cheaply and fairly than a cash lender ever could. The brand name, Credit Fair, was the thesis in two words.

The struggle years

Credit Fair’s history is a study in how a small NBFC can do everything operationally right and still be squeezed by forces outside its control. Two stretches stand out.

The first was the model reset. The original spread across education, healthcare, home decor and EVs was deliberately broad, but consumer-durable and lifestyle lending is a crowded, thin-margin fight against banks and larger fintechs. Over 2023 and 2024 the company narrowed hard toward rooftop solar, a segment with a clearer social story and access to green capital. That pivot changed who the company was, but it also meant walking away from categories it had spent years building merchant relationships in.

The second was the regulatory and funding vice. As Damani described it, the RBI’s tightening after 2023 raised compliance costs materially for small lenders, while the capital that had flowed freely into fintech lending dried up. The strain shows in the audited numbers: the loan book, which stood at ₹253.2 crore as of March 2024, shrank to ₹220.1 crore by March 2025 and to about ₹160 crore by March 2026 (Acuite and Inc42). Asset quality slipped in step, with gross non-performing assets rising from 0.86% in FY23 to 1.45% in FY24 and 2.44% in FY25. In September 2025 the rating agency Acuite cut the company’s rating from ACUITE BBB- to BB+, a downgrade that makes borrowing both harder and dearer, precisely the wrong direction for a lender whose whole business is access to cheap money.

The turning point

The turning point was not a fundraise but the absence of one. Through 2025 and into 2026 Credit Fair tried to raise both equity and debt to keep the solar book growing and could not close a round on terms it would accept. With the book below ₹300 crore, the company had fallen into the awkward middle: too big to run on founder capital, too small to be interesting to the institutions that fund scaled NBFCs.

On 1 July 2026 it took the exit. BlackSoil, an alternative-credit platform, acquired Credit Fair’s solar financing business in a cash slump sale for about ₹45 crore. The numbers on either side of the deal frame the whole story:

• Peak valuation: ~₹180 crore (Inc42, reported).
• Slump-sale consideration: ~₹45 crore, roughly one-quarter of that peak (Inc42; Indian Startup News).
• What BlackSoil bought: the solar loan book, the management team, the technology platform, the brand and the operating infrastructure, with acquired AUM of about ₹152.6 crore (SolarQuarter).
• Scale acquired: financing of roughly 80 MW of solar capacity, which BlackSoil said it aims to scale toward 1 GW over time.

Damani was explicit that the sale reflected the funding environment, not the quality of the portfolio, telling Inc42 that compliance costs had risen as the RBI tightened rules and that raising capital had become much harder for smaller NBFCs.

The money behind it

Credit Fair raised roughly $27 million to $32 million across about eight rounds over its life, split between equity and debt (Crunchbase, Tracxn, Inc42). The equity component was modest, around ₹48 crore in total per Inc42, which is part of why the funding squeeze proved fatal: the business was structurally dependent on wholesale debt it could no longer refinance. Key milestones:

• June 2021: about $15 million in debt and equity, with angel participation from Anand Ladsariya and Alok Agarwal (YourStory, StartupTalky).
• August 2022: about $10 million in debt and equity, a seed extension led by LC Nueva through its alternative investment fund (Business Standard).
• February 2025: $5 million in debt (about ₹43.4 crore) via a green basket bond issued by Symbiotics Investments and subscribed by British International Investment, earmarked for roughly 2,500 new rooftop solar projects (Inc42).
• Named backers over time: pi Ventures and LC Nueva (Nueva Capital) on equity; Symbiotics, British International Investment, State Bank of India and Northern Arc among debt providers (Tracxn, Inc42).

What each type of backer changed is instructive. The 2021 and 2022 rounds bought the runway to build the merchant network and prove the no-cost EMI model. The 2025 green bond from Symbiotics and British International Investment funded the solar pivot specifically, tying the company’s future to a single segment. When the next round did not arrive, there was no diversified base to fall back on.

How it makes money

The confusing thing about a no-cost EMI lender is working out who actually pays. Credit Fair’s economics broke down like this:

• Merchant subsidy (money in): on a zero-interest EMI, the merchant absorbs the interest cost as a discount, because offering easy financing helps close a high-ticket sale. This is the main reason a lender can advertise 0% and still earn.
• Interest income (money in): on low-cost rather than truly zero EMIs, and on longer-tenure loans, the borrower pays interest that the company keeps. Loans ran from three months to three years, with an average ticket around ₹3 lakh (Inc42).
• Fees (money in): borrowers paid nominal processing and insurance fees (StartupTalky).
• Cost of funds (money out): the largest cost. Credit Fair borrowed from banks and bond investors and re-lent at a spread; when its own rating fell to BB+, that spread compressed.
• Credit losses and opex (money out): defaults plus the cost of underwriting, collections and compliance.

The part people get wrong is assuming “no-cost EMI” means “no revenue.” In fact the merchant subsidy is the revenue; the lender’s skill is underwriting a new-to-credit customer quickly enough (approval in about two minutes, per Inc42) to win merchant partners while keeping defaults low. The margin sits in the gap between a cheap, stable cost of funds and a low default rate. Once the cost of funds rose and refinancing stalled, that gap closed.

The numbers

Figures below for FY23 to FY25 are from Acuite Ratings, drawn from the company’s audited financials; FY26 figures are as reported by Inc42 and are not from audited filings. Note the divergence: Acuite’s FY25 total income of ₹14.1 crore and Inc42’s FY26 revenue of ₹32 crore are on different bases, so treat the year-on-year jump with caution. Unit: ₹ crore.

The shape is clear even allowing for the FY26 caveat: a company that turned a small profit in FY23 (₹0.5 crore), then bled steadily as it grew the book and pivoted, with the loss widening to ₹8.4 crore in FY25 on shrinking audited income. Net worth held roughly flat at about ₹46.9 crore as of March 2025 (Acuite), while capital adequacy stayed comfortable at 24.7%, meaning the company was not undercapitalised on paper; it simply could not access growth funding.

Where the money comes from

Credit Fair’s lending was spread across categories and geographies rather than concentrated in one metro:

• By purpose: education, healthcare, home improvement, EVs and, latterly, rooftop solar, which became the dominant segment by 2025-26.
• By geography: disbursals reached across 20-plus states, not just the top cities (Inc42).
• By scale: more than 3.5 lakh loans and over ₹1,300 crore disbursed since 2018 (Inc42); the solar sub-book alone had served over 8,000 customers and avoided more than 4,100 tonnes of carbon emissions (company-stated).

The surprise sits in the mismatch between disbursal volume and the balance sheet. A company that had cumulatively pushed out ₹1,300 crore of credit held an on-book AUM of only about ₹160 crore at the end. That gap reflects the nature of point-of-sale lending: short tenures mean money is lent, repaid and must be re-lent constantly, so the business lives or dies on its ability to keep raising fresh funds to recycle. High throughput did not translate into a large standing book, and it was the standing book that investors and lenders sized the company by.

The risks

• Funding concentration and refinancing risk. A short-tenure lender must continually refinance to keep lending. Credit Fair’s thin equity base (about ₹48 crore) and dependence on wholesale debt meant a single frozen round could stall the whole machine, which is exactly what happened in 2025-26.
• The sub-scale trap. As Damani noted, NBFCs with AUM below ₹300 crore struggle to attract institutional capital. Credit Fair sat in this band and could not grow out of it fast enough, so it became structurally unfundable rather than operationally broken.
• Asset-quality and rating spiral. Gross NPAs rose to 2.44% by FY25 and Acuite cut the rating to BB+ in September 2025. For a lender, a downgrade raises the cost of funds and narrows the very spread the business runs on, a self-reinforcing squeeze.
• Regulatory cost load. Tighter RBI rules after 2023 raised compliance costs disproportionately for small lenders, an overhead that larger NBFCs absorb more easily.

The takeaway

The transferable lesson from Credit Fair is not about product; the product worked. It is about capital structure as destiny. A lending business is, at its core, a machine for borrowing money cheaply and lending it slightly less cheaply, and that machine only runs while the wholesale funding flows. Credit Fair built a genuine franchise, real merchant relationships, a working no-cost EMI model, a credible solar niche, and still had to sell for a quarter of its peak value because it was too small to fund and too dependent on a single lever it did not control. For anyone building a balance-sheet business, the moral is that operational excellence does not immunise you against a funding winter; the time to raise equity and diversify your sources is when you do not yet need to. The kindest reading of the BlackSoil sale is that Damani recognised this earlier than most, and found the book a home while it was still worth ₹45 crore rather than nothing.

Frequently asked questions

What is Credit Fair and what does it do?

Credit Fair is an RBI-registered NBFC founded in 2018 (legal entity K. M. Global Credit Private Limited) that offered no-cost and low-cost EMIs at the point of sale for education, healthcare, home improvement, EVs and, latterly, rooftop solar systems.

Who founded Credit Fair?

Aditya Damani is the founder and CEO; Tracxn also lists Vikas Agarwal as a co-founder. Damani previously worked at UK lender Oakam and at PIMCO, and holds an MBA from London Business School.

Why did Credit Fair sell to BlackSoil?

Founder Aditya Damani said the sale followed multiple failed attempts to raise equity and debt. Rising compliance costs and a difficult funding market for NBFCs with AUM below ₹300 crore left the company unable to fund further growth, so it sold its solar business to BlackSoil in a cash slump sale on 1 July 2026.

How much did BlackSoil pay for Credit Fair?

BlackSoil paid about ₹45 crore for Credit Fair’s solar financing business, which carried roughly ₹152.6 crore of AUM. That price was about a quarter of Credit Fair’s reported peak valuation of around ₹180 crore.

How much had Credit Fair lent overall?

As reported by Inc42, Credit Fair disbursed more than ₹1,300 crore across over 3.5 lakh loans in 20-plus states between 2018 and 2026, even though its standing loan book at the end was only about ₹160 crore.

Sources

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

• Inc42, “Once Valued At ₹180 Cr, Why Credit Fair Sold For ₹45 Cr” (July 2026)
• Inc42, “Credit Fair Raises $5 Mn In Debt From Symbiotics Investments” (February 2025)
• SolarQuarter, “BlackSoil Acquires Credit Fair’s Solar Financing Business” (July 2026)
• Indian Startup News, “BlackSoil Capital acquires Credit Fair’s solar financing business for Rs 45 crore” (July 2026)
• Acuite Ratings, rating rationale for K. M. Global Credit Private Limited (July 2024 and September 2025)
• YourStory, “Credit Fair raises $15M through a mix of equity and debt” (July 2021)
• Business Standard, “Fintech start-up Credit Fair raises $10 million in debt and equity” (August 2022)
• StartupTalky, “Story of Credit Fair” (company profile)
• Tracxn and Crunchbase, Credit Fair / K. M. Global Credit Private Limited company profiles (2026)
• Ministry of Corporate Affairs / ZaubaCorp, K. M. Global Credit Private Limited (CIN U65999MH2018PTC308921)

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