EarnKaro tells its users they can earn up to ₹40 lakh a month by forwarding shopping links on Telegram, and in the year to March 2025 its community pushed 2.3 billion of the 2.5 billion sales leads that its parent generated for 1,500-plus brands. Yet EarnKaro has never filed a single rupee of its own audited revenue, because on paper it is not a company at all.
EarnKaro is a brand, not a legal entity. It runs inside Pouring Pounds India Private Limited, the same Gurugram company that owns the better-known cashback site CashKaro. That single fact explains most of what is interesting about EarnKaro: it is the fast-growing, low-cost, Telegram-native half of a business whose audited numbers still show a loss. This piece looks at how a “resell links and earn” app became the group’s main engine for reach, what the shared accounts actually say, and where the model is fragile.
Quick facts
| Brand | EarnKaro (affiliate / social-commerce app) |
| Legal entity | Pouring Pounds India Private Limited (CIN U74999HR2013PTC048853), a subsidiary of UK-based Pouring Pounds Ltd. EarnKaro files no separate accounts. |
| Incorporated / launched | Entity incorporated 16 April 2013 (Gurugram); EarnKaro app launched July 2019 |
| Founders | Rohan Bhargava and Swati Bhargava (both directors of Pouring Pounds India) |
| Businesses | EarnKaro (affiliate link resharing) and CashKaro (cashback and coupons) under one company |
| Latest FY revenue (group) | ₹350 crore operating revenue in FY25 (year to 31 March 2025), up 20.7% year on year (Entrackr, from MCA filings) |
| Latest FY profit/loss (group) | EBITDA loss of about ₹21 crore in FY25, wider than the ₹15 crore EBITDA loss in FY24 (Entrackr) |
| Listed? | Private. No IPO announced as of September 2026 |
| Funding raised | About $32.5 million across five rounds; latest was a ₹130 crore Series C led by Affle Global in November 2022 (Tracxn; Inc42). Latest valuation not publicly disclosed. |
| Key backers | Kalaari Capital, Korea Investment Partners, Affle Global, and the late Ratan Tata as an early angel |
What EarnKaro does
EarnKaro is a deal-sharing platform. A user picks a product on a partner site, generates a tracked “Profit Link”, shares it on WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram or a blog, and earns a commission when someone buys through it. There is no inventory, no upfront cost and no requirement to be a registered business.
- Positioning: EarnKaro describes itself as India’s affiliate-marketing platform for individuals rather than agencies (company-stated).
- Catalogue: partnered with 200-plus shopping sites across fashion, beauty, grocery, OTC medicines, electronics and credit cards (company-stated, About page).
- Users: 4 million-plus registered users as of FY25, spanning students, homemakers, content creators and Telegram channel owners (CashKaro group release, August 2025).
- Payouts: over ₹1,000 crore paid directly to users across the group since inception, via bank transfer (CashKaro group release, FY25).
- The claimed top end: the company says its highest earners make up to ₹40 lakh a month (Entrackr); a company press note put the top figure at up to ₹50 lakh a month.
The origin
The story does not start in India. Rohan Bhargava, a London School of Economics graduate and CFA who had worked on structured-credit portfolios at international hedge funds, and Swati Bhargava, also an LSE alumna, built a cashback business in the United Kingdom called Pouring Pounds in 2011. The insight was simple and imported: online retailers pay affiliates a commission for sales, and a chunk of that commission can be handed back to the shopper as cashback to win loyalty.
In 2013 the couple brought the model to India and incorporated Pouring Pounds India Private Limited, trading as CashKaro. For six years the company ran the classic Western playbook: a website where shoppers logged in, clicked out to Amazon or Flipkart, and got cashback tracked to their account. The problem was that this assumed a shopper who visits a cashback site first. By the late 2010s a different behaviour had taken over India’s internet: people were already sharing deals with each other inside WhatsApp and Telegram groups, for free, with no way to get paid. EarnKaro, launched in July 2019, was the founders’ answer to that behaviour: instead of asking a shopper to come to a site, let anyone become the affiliate and monetise the sharing they were doing anyway.
The struggle years
EarnKaro’s parent has never been a story of straight-line success. Two structural problems have followed the group throughout: growth that swings with the affiliate economy, and a business that has stayed in the red even as revenue climbed.
- Growth deceleration: after roughly doubling scale in FY22, operating revenue growth at the group slowed sharply to 15.3% in FY23, when revenue reached ₹248.6 crore (Entrackr; Inc42).
- Persistent losses: the company has reported net losses every year on record, with a net loss of ₹14.8 crore in FY22 and ₹11.1 crore in FY23 (BW Disrupt; Inc42).
- Widening EBITDA loss despite growth: even as FY25 revenue rose to ₹350 crore, the EBITDA loss widened to about ₹21 crore from ₹15 crore in FY24 (Entrackr) — growth was bought, not banked.
- Headcount contraction: third-party data placed the EarnKaro-linked team at 281 employees as of August 2025, a roughly 13% decline year on year (Tracxn), pointing to cost discipline rather than expansion.
- Structural dependence: because both apps earn a slice of a commission set by someone else, a rate cut by a single large platform flows straight to the top line — a vulnerability the founders have acknowledged in interviews about margins.
The turning point
The turning point was the decision to stop being only a cashback site. Before EarnKaro, CashKaro’s reach was capped by how many shoppers would bother to route purchases through a cashback portal. After EarnKaro, the group turned every user into a distribution node, and Telegram did the rest.
The numbers on each side of that shift are stark. In FY25 the group generated about 2.5 billion sales leads in total; EarnKaro alone accounted for 2.3 billion of them, or roughly 92% (Entrackr). Telegram, not the app itself, is where most of that happens: the company says 85% of its affiliate-commerce traffic now flows through Telegram channels (Entrackr). A business that began as a login-and-click cashback website in 2013 had, by 2025, become a network whose growth engine is community chat groups it does not own. The same period took group revenue past ₹350 crore and GMV — the value of goods sold through its links — to about ₹6,000 crore across more than 1,500 brands and 36 million-plus transactions (Entrackr).
The money behind it
EarnKaro has never raised money as a standalone brand; the capital sits in Pouring Pounds India, and it is relatively lightly funded for its scale. The rounds, in order:
- Series A, 2015: about $3.8 million led by Kalaari Capital (Tracxn).
- Angel round, 2016: an undisclosed amount from Ratan Tata, then chairman emeritus of Tata Sons and a prolific startup angel until his death in October 2024 (Tracxn; company).
- Series B, September 2020: $10 million led by Korea Investment Partners with existing backer Kalaari Capital (Inc42; Business Standard).
- Series C, November 2022: ₹130 crore (about $16 million) led by Affle Global Pte Ltd, the listed adtech company (Inc42).
Total disclosed funding is roughly $32.5 million across five rounds (Tracxn). What each backer changed is instructive: Kalaari gave the company its first institutional runway and stayed across rounds; Korea Investment Partners brought growth capital as the group scaled past ₹200 crore; and Affle’s 2022 lead tied CashKaro-EarnKaro into a listed adtech ecosystem with an obvious strategic interest in performance marketing. The group has not disclosed a headline valuation for the Series C, so any valuation figure in circulation should be treated as unconfirmed.
How it makes money
The mechanics are a commission pass-through, and the place the margin sits is the gap between what brands pay and what users are paid.
- Money in: partner brands (Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, Ajio and others, plus credit-card issuers) pay the group a commission or a fixed bounty for each tracked sale or sign-up.
- Money out to users: CashKaro returns part of that commission to the shopper as cashback; EarnKaro pays it to the sharer as profit. The user-facing payout is the largest variable cost.
- Where the margin sits: the group keeps the spread between the brand commission and the user payout, minus technology, payments and marketing costs.
- The part people get wrong: EarnKaro is not a reselling business in the Meesho sense. Users never buy, hold or ship goods; they are paid only when a purchase completes through their tracked link, so the group carries no inventory or logistics cost.
- The low-cost claim: management says its customer-acquisition cost is far lower than buying users on Meta or Google, because users arrive through peer sharing, and that repeat-customer retention runs above 90% (CashKaro group release, FY25). These are company-stated figures.
The numbers
One number matters before the table: these are consolidated figures for Pouring Pounds India Private Limited, the CashKaro-plus-EarnKaro entity. EarnKaro does not publish standalone revenue, so its contribution is visible in operating metrics (leads, GMV share) rather than in a separate profit-and-loss statement. All figures are in ₹ crore.
| Fiscal year | Operating revenue (₹ cr) | Net loss / EBITDA loss (₹ cr) |
| FY22 | 216.2 | Net loss 14.8 |
| FY23 | 248.6 | Net loss 11.1 |
| FY24 | ~290 to 302 (see note) | EBITDA loss ~15 |
| FY25 | 350.0 | EBITDA loss ~21 |
- FY25 operating revenue was ₹350 crore (about $36 million; $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026, Trading Economics), up 20.7% from FY24 (Entrackr).
- FY24 revenue is reported at ₹290 crore in the FY25 audited comparative (Entrackr); an earlier Inc42 report pegged FY24 operating revenue near ₹302 crore. The two sources differ, so the range is given and both are named.
- FY23 operating revenue of ₹248.6 crore split into ₹230.6 crore from platform services and ₹18 crore from e-voucher sales (Entrackr).
- Profitability has moved the wrong way recently: the EBITDA loss widened from about ₹15 crore in FY24 to about ₹21 crore in FY25 (Entrackr), even as revenue grew.
Where the money comes from
The revenue mix has a surprise in it: a cashback-and-coupons company earns a meaningful share of its money from financial products, not just shopping.
- Financial services: roughly 20% of group revenue came from the financial-services vertical — mainly credit-card recommendations and sign-up bounties — in FY24 (Inc42). Card bounties pay far more per conversion than a typical retail commission.
- Retail commerce: fashion, beauty and D2C brands remain the core categories driving GMV, alongside marketplaces such as Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra and Ajio.
- Channel split: EarnKaro’s traffic is overwhelmingly social, with 85% of affiliate-commerce traffic via Telegram (Entrackr), whereas CashKaro’s is more site- and app-led.
- Lead concentration: EarnKaro drove 2.3 billion of the group’s 2.5 billion FY25 leads, so the group’s reach is now concentrated in the app that earns no separate revenue line (Entrackr).
- GMV scale: about ₹6,000 crore of goods were sold across 1,500-plus partner brands and 36 million-plus transactions in FY25 (Entrackr).
The risks
- Platform dependence and commission risk: the group does not set the commissions it splits. If Amazon, Flipkart or a large card issuer cuts affiliate rates or changes attribution rules, revenue falls with no offsetting lever, because there is no product markup to protect. This mechanism already shows up in the swing from doubling in FY22 to 15.3% growth in FY23.
- Channel-ownership risk: 85% of EarnKaro’s affiliate traffic runs through Telegram (Entrackr), a platform the company neither owns nor controls. A change to Telegram’s rules on affiliate links, forwarding or channel monetisation, or an account-level crackdown, would hit the group’s single biggest distribution route.
- Profitability risk: despite ₹350 crore in revenue, the group posted a widening EBITDA loss of about ₹21 crore in FY25 (Entrackr). Continued heavy user payouts and marketing mean profitability is a choice the group has not yet made, and the FY26 goal of more than $1 billion in GMV (company-stated) implies more spend, not less.
The takeaway
EarnKaro’s lesson is about where value hides inside a group. The brand with the audited revenue, CashKaro, is not the brand doing most of the reach; the brand doing most of the reach, EarnKaro, has no revenue line of its own. A founder chasing the wrong metric would have doubled down on the cashback site because that is where the reported money is. The Bhargavas instead built the free, community-native product that generates 92% of the leads, accepted that it would blur into the group accounts, and let distribution compound. The transferable idea is that the part of a business that scales cheapest is often the part that looks least like a business on the balance sheet, and it is worth backing anyway.
Frequently asked questions
Is EarnKaro a separate company from CashKaro?
No. Both are brands owned by Pouring Pounds India Private Limited (CIN U74999HR2013PTC048853), a Gurugram company incorporated in April 2013 and a subsidiary of UK-based Pouring Pounds Ltd. EarnKaro does not file separate audited accounts.
Who founded EarnKaro and when?
EarnKaro was launched in July 2019 by Rohan Bhargava and Swati Bhargava, who had earlier founded Pouring Pounds in the UK in 2011 and CashKaro in India in 2013.
How does EarnKaro make money for its users?
Users create a tracked “Profit Link” for a product on a partner site and share it. When someone buys through that link, the user earns a commission. There is no inventory to buy and no cost to join; users are paid only on completed purchases.
How much revenue does the group make?
Pouring Pounds India reported ₹350 crore in operating revenue in FY25, up 20.7% year on year, with an EBITDA loss of about ₹21 crore (Entrackr, from MCA filings). EarnKaro’s share is not broken out separately.
Has EarnKaro or CashKaro raised funding?
The parent has raised about $32.5 million across five rounds, including a $10 million Series B in 2020 led by Korea Investment Partners and a ₹130 crore Series C in November 2022 led by Affle Global. Ratan Tata was an early angel investor.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Entrackr, “CashKaro hits Rs 350 Cr revenue in FY25, GMV soars to Rs 6,000 Cr” (August 2025)
- Inc42, “Exclusive: Ratan Tata-Backed CashKaro’s Revenue Crosses INR 300 Cr Mark In FY24” (2024)
- Inc42, “CashKaro Narrows Its Loss 25% YoY In FY23, Crosses INR 250 Cr Revenue Mark” (January 2024)
- BW Disrupt, “CashKaro Shrinks Losses By 25% To Rs 11.1 Cr In FY23” (2024)
- CXOToday, “CashKaro Hits ₹350 Cr in Revenue, Crosses ₹6,000 Cr in Sales for Partners in FY25” (press release, August 2025)
- Inc42, “CashKaro Raises $10 Mn In Series B Funding From Korea Investment Partners & Kalaari Capital” (September 2020)
- Business Standard, “Ratan Tata-backed CashKaro raises $10 mn from investors in Series B funding” (September 2020)
- Tofler, “Pouring Pounds India Private Limited” company record (CIN U74999HR2013PTC048853)
- Tracxn, “Pouring Pounds India Private Limited” and “CashKaro” funding and financials profiles (2026)
- EarnKaro, “About Us” (company page, accessed September 2026)
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