Startup Deep Dive : Credit Wise Capital — it took six years to land its first institutional cheque

Credit Wise Capital took six years to land its first institutional cheque, and when it finally arrived in July 2025 it was worth more than four times everything the founders had raised from angels since 2018: a single ₹200 crore round from a private equity fund most Indian readers had never heard of. The bet behind it rests on a line that sounds like heresy from a fintech founder: a lender’s job is not to disburse loans, it is to collect them.

That contrarian framing belongs to Aalesh Avlani, who co-founded the Mumbai-based two-wheeler financier and has spent seven years building an NBFC that deliberately looks unfashionable next to app-first consumer lenders. The company now carries a loan book of roughly ₹628-645 crore, turns a small but growing profit, and is trying to prove that unglamorous, collections-first lending can scale in a segment where rivals have been burned by rising defaults.

Quick facts

What they do

Credit Wise Capital is a Mumbai-headquartered, RBI-registered NBFC that lends money to people buying two-wheelers, most of whom would struggle to get a loan from a bank. Its core product finances motorcycles, scooters, super-bikes and electric two-wheelers, usually through dealership counters rather than an app download, and it layers on small personal loans, insurance and vehicle-protection add-ons once a borrower is on its books. By July 2025 the company said it was operating across 215 cities in 10 states, a sharp expansion from the Mumbai-and-Pune footprint it had when it raised its first seed round.

The origin

Aalesh Avlani did not come to lending from a bank. He is a Questrom School of Business graduate who had already built and run Samyakth Capital, a venture fund, and picked up a Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 mention before turning to consumer finance. His pitch for Credit Wise Capital rests on a distinction he has repeated in founder interviews: a fintech optimises for customer acquisition and disbursal, but a lender’s real job starts after the money goes out the door, in collections. That is why the company built its own collections and pre-delinquency tooling early, rather than treating it as an afterthought bolted on once defaults showed up. To pair that lending discipline with operating experience the business does not usually find in a founder’s CV, it added Gurpreet Singh Sodhi, an IIM Calcutta graduate with more than three decades inside Bajaj Auto, Hero Motors, HDFC Bank and HDB Financial Services, as chief executive and co-founder. The combination was deliberate: a financier’s instinct for risk paired with an operator who had already scaled vehicle and consumer finance at India’s largest lenders.

The struggle years

The company’s own numbers show the strain of building a lending book from a standing start. In FY23, three years after its founding, Credit Wise Capital was running with a capital adequacy ratio of just 24.3% and gearing of 3.2 times, the tightest capital position of any year on record, according to CRISIL Ratings. Total income that year was a modest ₹43.1 crore and profit after tax was ₹1.5 crore, thin margins for a business absorbing the fixed costs of underwriting technology and a dealer network. The company also spent six years raising money exclusively from angels and a single venture-backed seed round, first ₹7.2 million dollars led by Venture Catalysts in November 2019, then a further $6 million from a group of individual angel investors, including Ajay Goel, Anuj Golecha, Gaurav Gandhi, Anup Agarwal, Gaurav Singhvi and Mayank Shah, in October 2020, in the middle of the pandemic disruption that hit vehicle sales across India. No institutional private equity fund backed the company through that stretch.

Asset quality has been the second recurring pressure point. Loans 90 days or more overdue held near 1.9-2.0% through FY23, FY24 and FY25, but had climbed to 2.9% by the June 2025 quarter and gross non-performing assets on the company’s own book reached 4.8% by September 2025, CRISIL’s ratings commentary shows. That is the mechanical risk of two-wheeler lending laid bare: borrowers skew toward informal or irregular incomes, and even a modest slowdown in collections shows up quickly in delinquency numbers.

The turning point

The turning point is dated precisely: on 8 July 2025, Trident Growth Partners announced a ₹120 crore investment as the anchor of a ₹200 crore (~$20.8 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026, Trading Economics) funding round, Credit Wise Capital’s first from an institutional private equity investor and the second cheque written from TGP’s ₹2,000 crore debut fund. The before-and-after is visible in the company’s own balance sheet. Net worth stood at ₹113 crore before the round and rose to ₹178 crore afterward; gearing fell from 2.6 times to 1.8 times; and capital adequacy, which had been squeezed to 24.3% two years earlier, jumped to 41.2% by the first quarter of FY26, per CRISIL’s rating update. For a company that had spent six years financing growth off angel cheques and on-balance-sheet borrowing, one institutional round more than tripled its cushion against loan losses in a single quarter.

The money behind it

• November 2019: approximately $7.2 million seed round led by Venture Catalysts (Inc42 funding data).
• October 2020: $6 million from a group of angel investors, including Ajay Goel, Anuj Golecha, Gaurav Gandhi, Anup Agarwal, Gaurav Singhvi and Mayank Shah, raised through the early months of the pandemic (Entrepreneur India, October 2020).
• July 2025: ₹200 crore round, the company’s first institutional raise, anchored by a ₹120 crore cheque from Trident Growth Partners (Entrackr and Entrepreneur India, July 2025).
• Total disclosed funding: reported at $35.2 million across three rounds as of July 2025 (Tracxn; the company has not published a consolidated lifetime total).
• Latest valuation: not disclosed by the company; a company-data aggregator, Tracxn, pegs it at roughly ₹611 crore as of June 2025 — unconfirmed by a second source and treated here as a single-source estimate.
• What each backer changed: Venture Catalysts’ 2019 seed gave the company its first institutional-quality cap table and dealer-expansion capital; the 2020 angel round, raised by individuals with banking and NBFC operating backgrounds rather than funds, kept the company capitalised through the pandemic; Trident Growth Partners’ 2025 cheque was explicitly earmarked to scale the secured lending book, fund the proprietary lending platform and push into tier II-IV cities, and it reset the capital-adequacy cushion investors had flagged as tight.

How it makes money

Credit Wise Capital earns the way most vehicle-finance NBFCs do: interest income on the loan book, plus fee income from insurance and add-on products sold alongside the loan, minus the cost of the money it borrows to lend and the cost of running underwriting, collections and a dealer-facing sales force.

• Pricing: the company publishes an interest-rate band of 8-30% a year on its own site, with tenures running up to 36 months for two-wheeler loans and up to 48 months across its lending products.
• Loan-to-value: it will finance up to 100% of a vehicle’s on-road price, higher than the industry norm of financing only the ex-showroom price, which raises both ticket size and risk per loan.
• Distribution: loans are originated through more than 100 dealer partners tied to original equipment manufacturers, including Honda, Hero, TVS, Bajaj, Suzuki, Yamaha and Bounce Infinity, rather than primarily through a consumer app.
• Funding side: the company borrows on its own balance sheet and also draws on more than 20 lending and co-lending partners, among them SBI, HDFC, AU Small Finance Bank, Tata Capital, Muthoot and ESAF, which supply wholesale capital it on-lends at a spread.
• Where the margin sits: CRISIL’s own analysis flags that operating expenses equal to 13.3% of managed assets are the binding constraint on profitability, not the interest spread itself, which explains why return on managed assets has stayed in a narrow 0.4-0.8% band through FY23-FY26.
• What people get wrong: the interest rate is not the business. A two-wheeler NBFC’s economics are decided in the collections queue, not the pricing sheet, which is precisely the philosophy Avlani has built the company around; a loan priced well but collected poorly still loses money.

The numbers

Figures below are consolidated, drawn from CRISIL Ratings’ rating rationale for Credit Wise Capital Private Limited (29 October 2025). All figures in ₹ crore.

Two data providers give slightly different FY25 AUM figures, ₹628 crore per CRISIL’s rating note against ₹645 crore cited in press coverage of the July 2025 funding round; both are shown rather than picking one, since neither is a self-evident error.

Where the money comes from

• Product mix: the loan book is overwhelmingly two-wheeler and electric two-wheeler financing, with small personal loans (branded CWC Cash, capped at ₹50,000), MSME loans, and insurance distribution (motor, health, life and loan-protector cover under the CWC Alliance brand) layered on as secondary revenue lines.
• Geography: the company scaled from two cities, Mumbai and Pune, at the time of its 2020 seed round to 215 cities across 10 states by July 2025, a stated strategic push into tier II-IV towns where formal two-wheeler financing is thinner (Entrackr, July 2025).
• Channel: origination runs primarily through more than 100 OEM-linked dealer partners rather than direct digital acquisition, which the company calls a “phygital” model, pairing physical dealer relationships with a digital underwriting and collections stack it calls CWC Tech.
• The surprise: for a company whose founder pitches an anti-fintech, collections-first identity, it also runs a fintech-style rapid-approval product, TWIN2, which promises an app-less loan decision in roughly two minutes and disbursement in about 20 minutes, a speed claim usually associated with the digital-first lenders Avlani has publicly distinguished the company from.

The risks

• Rising delinquency: gross non-performing assets on the company’s own book climbed to 4.8% by September 2025 from 90-plus-day delinquency of under 2.0% across FY23-FY25, a documented deterioration CRISIL attributes to normal stresses in two-wheeler lending as the book scales into new geographies.
• Sector-wide credit stress: industry data from CRIF Highmark shows two-wheeler loan delinquency in the 31-180 day category nationally rising to 5.8% by September 2024 from 5.1% three months earlier, meaning Credit Wise Capital is scaling into a segment where the underlying credit cycle is already turning (Business Standard, February 2025).
• Thin unit economics: CRISIL flags operating expenses at 13.3% of managed assets as the main drag on profitability, holding return on managed assets to a narrow 0.4-0.8% band even as the loan book has nearly doubled since FY23, meaning growth alone will not fix margins without cost discipline.

The takeaway

The lesson in Credit Wise Capital’s climb is not about two-wheelers specifically. It is about sequencing conviction ahead of capital. Avlani built the company’s collections infrastructure before he had the balance sheet institutional investors wanted to see, on the argument that a lender’s discipline shows up in what happens after disbursal, not before it. That took six years to pay off in the form most founders chase first, a marquee institutional round, and the company still has to prove that discipline against a two-wheeler credit cycle that is turning against it nationally. Building the unglamorous part of the business early does not guarantee the glamorous outcome later, but it at least gives a founder something to point to when the capital finally arrives.

Frequently asked questions

What does Credit Wise Capital do?

It is a Mumbai-based, RBI-registered NBFC that finances two-wheeler and electric two-wheeler purchases, along with small personal loans, MSME loans and insurance products, mostly originated through dealership partnerships rather than a direct-to-consumer app.

Who founded Credit Wise Capital and when?

It was incorporated on 8 March 2018 under the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, with Aalesh Avlani as founder; Gurpreet Singh Sodhi, a veteran of Bajaj Auto, Hero Motors, HDFC Bank and HDB Financial Services, joined as chief executive and is now listed as co-founder on the company’s own site.

How much funding has Credit Wise Capital raised?

It raised roughly $7.2 million in a Venture Catalysts-led seed round in November 2019, a further $6 million from angel investors in October 2020, and ₹200 crore in its first institutional round led by Trident Growth Partners in July 2025. A data aggregator, Tracxn, puts total disclosed funding at $35.2 million as of July 2025; the company has not published its own lifetime total.

Is Credit Wise Capital profitable?

Yes, on a small scale. Consolidated profit after tax was ₹1.5 crore in FY23, ₹3.7 crore in FY24 and ₹4.3 crore in FY25, according to CRISIL Ratings, with return on managed assets staying in a narrow 0.4-0.8% band across those years.

What is the biggest risk to Credit Wise Capital’s business?

Asset quality. Gross non-performing assets on its own book rose to 4.8% by September 2025 from under 2.0% in FY23-FY25, in a two-wheeler lending segment where industry-wide delinquency has also been rising, per CRIF Highmark data reported by Business Standard.

Sources

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

• CRISIL Ratings, rating rationale for Credit Wise Capital Private Limited, 29 October 2025
• Entrackr, “Trident Growth Partners leads Rs 200 Cr round in Credit Wise Capital”, July 2025
• Entrepreneur India, “Credit Wise Capital Raises INR 200 Cr in Funding Led by Trident Growth Partners”, July 2025
• BW Disrupt, “Trident Growth Partners Invests Rs 120 Cr In Credit Wise Capital, Leads Rs 200 Cr Growth Round”, July 2025
• Entrepreneur India, “Two-wheeler Fintech Lender Credit Wise Capital Raises $6 Mn Seed Capital from Angel Investors”, October 2020
• Inc42, “Credit Wise Capital Funding — Total Funding, Rounds & Investors”, accessed September 2026
• Inc42, “Aalesh Avlani — Founder, Credit Wise Capital”, startup profile, accessed September 2026
• Founder Thesis, “Aalesh Avlani is building a lending business with an anti-fintech approach”, accessed September 2026
• Credit Wise Capital, “About Us”, creditwisecapital.com, accessed September 2026
• Credit Wise Capital, homepage and two-wheeler loan product page, creditwisecapital.com, accessed September 2026
• Zauba Corp, company record for Credit Wise Capital Private Limited, CIN U65999MH2018PTC306086, accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, CreditWise Capital company profile (funding total, valuation estimate, headcount), accessed September 2026
• BuiltIn Mumbai, Credit Wise Capital company profile (headcount), accessed September 2026
• Business Standard, “Delinquencies in 2W segment rise substantially in September: CRIF Highmark”, February 2025

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