Startup Deep Dive : Easebuzz — profit jumps 46-fold on a margin of three paise in the rupee

Easebuzz keeps about three paise of every rupee that moves through its systems. On that margin, the Pune-based payments company still turned a net profit that grew 46 times over in a single year — from ₹37.7 lakh in FY24 to ₹18.8 crore (~$19.6 million) in FY25 — on revenue of ₹656 crore (~$68.3 million), as per its FY25 numbers reported by Entrackr and Inc42 from Registrar of Companies filings in October 2025.

It took Easebuzz eleven years to get there, and for most of that time it ran without the one document that now defines its business: a full payment aggregator licence from the Reserve Bank of India. The company spent nearly two and a half years operating on a mere “in-principle” nod before the RBI granted final authorisation in February 2025, and by November 2025 it had become one of only three fintechs in the country cleared to run online, offline and cross-border payment aggregation under a single umbrella. This is the story of how a bootstrapped Symbiosis-alumni startup turned thin-margin plumbing into a licensed, profitable payments business — and what still makes that business fragile.

Quick facts

What they do

Easebuzz sells the plumbing that lets an Indian business collect and disburse money online, in person and, since November 2025, across borders — one dashboard and one set of APIs instead of separate integrations for cards, UPI, net banking and wallets. Its customers are largely small and mid-sized businesses that cannot build or negotiate payment infrastructure on their own: schools and universities, real-estate developers, insurance and lending firms, government departments and e-commerce sellers, among others, according to reporting on its April 2025 funding round by Entrepreneur India. The company describes itself as a “B2B payment gateway for SMEs” offering plug-and-play APIs for payments, disbursements and financial operations, per Entrackr’s October 2025 financial report.

The origin

Rohit Prasad and Amit Kumar met as postgraduate students at Symbiosis in Pune and had put in years of industry exposure before starting the company full-time, according to YourStory’s company profile. The venture was incorporated on 23 December 2014 under the name SRV Media Technologies Private Limited, records with India’s Ministry of Corporate Affairs show, before it was rebuilt and rebranded as Easebuzz, which began commercial operations in 2016. The founding insight was narrow and unglamorous rather than a grand pitch: payments are single events, but collecting money from thousands of customers is a repeated, messy process, and India’s informal and semi-formal businesses were paying too much, in cash and in friction, to run it. Easebuzz’s pitch was to formalise that collection process at the lowest possible cost to the merchant, a framing the founders have repeated in later interviews and that still describes the company’s positioning as a low-cost, high-volume payments utility rather than a premium enterprise platform.

The struggle years

The company’s own numbers tell an unglamorous growth story. In FY19, Easebuzz’s operating revenue was about ₹5.33 crore and it posted a net profit of just ₹1.9 lakh — a margin of roughly 0.35 paise on the rupee. In FY20, revenue grew 78% to ₹9.5 crore, but expenses grew nearly as fast, at 73%, leaving a profit of only ₹4.7 lakh, according to Entrackr’s reporting from the time of its 2021 fundraise. For a company that had already been operating for five to six years, that is not a hockey-stick trajectory; it is a business surviving on discipline rather than scale, funded almost entirely out of its own thin cash flows rather than venture capital, since Easebuzz did not close an institutional round until 2021.

The second, longer struggle was regulatory rather than financial. India’s central bank introduced a licensing regime for payment aggregators under the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, and Easebuzz secured only an in-principle approval in August 2022, according to contemporary coverage. That in-principle status did not convert into a final authorisation for close to two and a half years — the RBI did not grant Easebuzz final approval to operate as an online payment aggregator until February 2025. The stakes of that gap were visible industry-wide: in December 2022, the RBI ordered larger rivals including Razorpay, Cashfree and Stripe’s Indian payment business to pause onboarding new merchants altogether until they cleared compliance audits, a sector-wide reminder that an in-principle nod bought time, not certainty. Easebuzz kept operating and growing revenue through this stretch, but it did so as a company whose core licence to exist as a payment aggregator was, on paper, still provisional.

The turning point

The clearest inflection point is Easebuzz’s ₹240 crore (about $28.2–30 million) Series A round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners and closed in April 2025 — its first large institutional raise, coming two months after the RBI’s final payment aggregator authorisation in February 2025. The numbers on either side of that round are stark. In FY24, the year before the raise, Easebuzz’s revenue was ₹289.2 crore and its net profit was a wafer-thin ₹37.7 lakh, a business growing at roughly 23% year-on-year. In FY25, the year the round closed, revenue rose 2.3x to ₹656 crore and net profit rose about 46-fold to ₹18.8 crore, per Entrackr’s and Inc42’s October 2025 reporting on its FY25 filings. Correlation is not the same as proof of causation — Easebuzz does not publicly attribute the jump solely to the raise — but a company that had spent a decade adding revenue in the tens of crores a year suddenly added more than ₹360 crore in twelve months, in the same window that it finally became a fully licensed, capitalised payment aggregator rather than a provisionally approved one.

The money behind it

• December 2018 — undisclosed round: Reliance-backed accelerator JioGenNext invested an undisclosed amount, Easebuzz’s first outside capital, according to Inc42’s funding tracker.
• April 2021 — seed/Series A, $4 million (₹28.6 crore): Led by 8i Ventures, Varanium Capital and Guild Capital, with former Citrus Pay founders Amrish Rau and Jitendra Gupta investing personally (₹1.75 crore each); post-money valuation of about $17 million (₹125 crore); the company said it had maintained profitability through FY19 and FY20 (Entrackr, April 2021).
• April 2025 — Series A, $30 million (₹240 crore): Led by Bessemer Venture Partners (₹141.28 crore, the largest single cheque), with participation from existing investors 8i Ventures and Varanium Capital; comprised ₹200 crore in fresh primary capital and ₹40 crore in secondary sale; Entrackr estimated a post-money valuation of $195–200 million based on RoC allotment filings, up from roughly $12 million at seed stage.
• Total raised: about $34 million across three disclosed rounds as of April 2025, per Inc42.
• What each backer changed: JioGenNext’s 2018 cheque was validation capital rather than growth fuel; the 2021 round, anchored by fellow payments-industry founders Rau and Gupta, brought operating credibility in a market they had built themselves at Citrus Pay; the 2025 Bessemer-led round brought the largest single primary cheque in the company’s history and, per Bessemer partner Vishal Gupta’s comment reported by Entrepreneur India, backed a company “growing rapidly, innovating with speed, and doing so profitably from day one.”
• What’s next: Entrackr reported in December 2025 that Easebuzz was in advanced talks to raise a further $30 million at close to a $250 million post-money valuation; as of that report the round had not been confirmed as closed by the company.

How it makes money

Easebuzz is, in substance, a take-rate business dressed up as a software platform. It charges merchants a fee — a small percentage of each transaction plus, in some cases, fixed charges — for routing a payment across the card networks, UPI, net banking and wallet rails, then passes on the bulk of that fee to the banks, card networks and UPI infrastructure it depends on. The company itself discloses just how thin that spread is: in FY25, “unit economics” worked out to roughly ₹0.97 spent for every rupee earned, and its EBITDA margin was 4.27%, according to Entrackr’s October 2025 analysis of its FY25 filings. The single largest cost line was payment processing charges, which absorbed ₹545.5 crore of the company’s ₹656 crore in FY25 revenue — more than 83 paise of every rupee it earned. What people get wrong about a business like this is assuming that revenue growth automatically means margin growth: Easebuzz’s revenue tripled from FY22 to FY25, but its EBITDA margin (4.27% in FY25) still sits well below the double-digit margins of software businesses it is sometimes compared to, because most of that revenue is a pass-through fee, not a licence sale.

The numbers

• FY22→FY23: revenue nearly doubled, up 92.2% to ₹236 crore, with the company reporting an annualised gross transaction value (GTV) of ₹70,000 crore, or about $8 billion annualised (Entrackr, July 2023).
• FY23→FY24: revenue grew a more modest 23% to ₹289.2 crore, with net profit falling to ₹37.7 lakh even as the top line grew (Business Standard/Entrackr, September–October 2024).
• FY24→FY25: revenue jumped 2.3x to ₹656 crore and net profit rose roughly 46x to ₹18.8 crore; total expenditure grew almost 120% to ₹634.3 crore (Entrackr/Inc42, October 2025).
• Balance sheet, FY25: cash and bank balances of ₹142.2 crore and total current assets of ₹196.7 crore, with ROCE improving to 18% (Entrackr, October 2025).

Where the money comes from

• Revenue mix, FY25: ₹655.7 crore of ₹656 crore in operating revenue — effectively all of it — came from transaction/payment-processing fees; revenue from IT-support and licence fees collapsed 98% to just ₹0.4 crore, down from ₹19 crore in FY24 (Entrackr, October 2025). Total revenue including ₹2.9 crore of other income stood at about ₹659 crore.
• The surprise: a company that markets itself on “plug-and-play APIs” and software tooling now earns almost none of its revenue from software licensing — it is, on the numbers, a pure payment-processing fee business.
• Merchant base: more than 2.5 lakh (250,000) businesses on the platform as of November 2025, processing about 3 million transactions a day, per Easebuzz’s own press release and corroborated by Yahoo Finance’s coverage of the same announcement.
• Customer segments: education, real estate, BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance), government and e-commerce merchants, according to Entrepreneur India’s April 2025 report on the Series A round.
• Scale trajectory: annualised GTV of about $30 billion in FY25 (Entrepreneur India, April 2025) rising to more than $50 billion annualised by November 2025, per Easebuzz’s own press release, corroborated independently by Yahoo Finance’s report on the same date.
• Geographic and product mix, newest addition: until November 2025 Easebuzz’s RBI authorisation covered only domestic online payments; that month it added offline (PoS and UPI Soundbox) and cross-border inward and outward payment authorisation, becoming, per its own statement, one of only three payment fintechs in India to hold all three licences at once.

The risks

• Margin fragility: payment-processing charges consumed ₹545.5 crore, or more than 83%, of FY25 revenue, leaving an EBITDA margin of just 4.27% and unit economics of roughly ₹0.97 spent per rupee earned (Entrackr, October 2025). A modest rise in interchange or network costs, or a large-merchant fee renegotiation, could compress an already thin margin further.
• Regulatory dependency: Easebuzz’s core business exists at the RBI’s discretion. It took from August 2022 to February 2025 to convert an in-principle payment aggregator approval into a final one, and the industry has direct precedent for regulatory shocks — in December 2022 the RBI ordered Razorpay, Cashfree and Stripe’s India payments unit to stop onboarding new merchants pending compliance audits (Business Standard, December 2022). Any tightening of PA norms, KYC rules or merchant-onboarding requirements can slow growth industry-wide with little notice.
• Revenue concentration in one line item: with IT-support and licence-fee revenue down 98% year-on-year to just ₹0.4 crore in FY25, essentially all of Easebuzz’s revenue now comes from transaction-processing fees (Entrackr, October 2025). That leaves the business more exposed than before to any single shift in transaction fee schedules, large-merchant pricing pressure or a slowdown in digital payment volumes, since it no longer has a meaningful secondary revenue stream to fall back on.

The takeaway

Easebuzz’s numbers argue against a common assumption in Indian fintech: that profitability early on is proof of a durable, high-margin business. It is not. Easebuzz was posting small profits as far back as FY19 and FY20, on margins measured in single-digit lakhs against crores of revenue, and even after its FY25 profit jump its EBITDA margin sits at a modest 4.27%, with 83 paise of every rupee still going straight out the door to payment-processing costs. What actually changed the company’s trajectory was not a growth hack or a marketing push; it was clearing a regulatory gate — the RBI’s final payment aggregator authorisation in February 2025 — which unlocked both institutional capital and the confidence of larger merchants to route volume through the platform. For a business built on thin transactional margins, the licence to operate at scale, applied for years before it was actually granted, mattered as much as the product itself.

Frequently asked questions

What does Easebuzz do?

Easebuzz is an RBI-authorised payment aggregator that lets Indian businesses collect payments online, in person (via PoS and UPI Soundbox) and, since November 2025, across borders, along with payout and B2B collection APIs, mainly for small and mid-sized merchants in sectors such as education, real estate, BFSI, government and e-commerce (Entrepreneur India, April 2025; Easebuzz press release, November 2025).

Who founded Easebuzz and when?

Easebuzz was founded by Rohit Prasad (CEO) and Amit Kumar (CTO), both Symbiosis postgraduates, incorporated on 23 December 2014 as SRV Media Technologies Private Limited before its rebrand, with commercial operations beginning in 2016 (MCA/Zaubacorp records; YourStory).

How much funding has Easebuzz raised?

Easebuzz has raised about $34 million across three disclosed rounds: an undisclosed 2018 cheque from JioGenNext, a $4 million round in April 2021 led by 8i Ventures, Varanium Capital and Guild Capital, and a $30 million (₹240 crore) Series A in April 2025 led by Bessemer Venture Partners, which Entrackr estimated valued the company at $195–200 million post-money (Inc42; Entrackr, April 2025).

Is Easebuzz profitable?

Yes. Easebuzz reported a net profit of ₹18.8 crore in FY25 on revenue of ₹656 crore, up from a profit of ₹37.7 lakh on ₹289.2 crore of revenue in FY24, and the company has also disclosed small profits in earlier years including FY19, FY20 and FY23 (Entrackr, various dates through October 2025).

Does Easebuzz have an RBI payment aggregator licence?

Yes. Easebuzz received in-principle RBI approval for payment aggregation in August 2022, final authorisation to operate as an online payment aggregator in February 2025, and in November 2025 added offline and cross-border payment aggregation authorisation, making it one of only three Indian payment fintechs with all three authorisations at once (Easebuzz press release; Business Standard; Yahoo Finance, November 2025).

Sources

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

• Entrackr, “Easebuzz reports 2.3X revenue growth in FY25; PAT jumps to Rs 19 Cr,” October 2025
• Entrackr, “Decoding Easebuzz’s Series A round, valuation and captable,” April 2025
• Entrackr, “Easebuzz raises $4 Mn in seed round; maintains profitability in FY20,” April 2021
• Entrackr, “Easebuzz’s scale doubles to Rs 230 Cr in FY23; remains profitable,” July 2023
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: Easebuzz in talks to raise around $30 Mn at over $250 Mn valuation,” December 2025
• Inc42, “Easebuzz’s FY25 Profit Zooms To INR 19 Cr, Revenue Surpasses INR 600 Cr,” October 2025
• Inc42, “Easebuzz — Total Funding, Funding Over Time, Funding By Rounds,” accessed September 2026
• Business Standard, “Easebuzz Revenue Surges to Rs 290 Crore in FY24; Forays into B2B Payments,” September 2024
• Business Standard, “Easebuzz’s revenue up to Rs 236 cr in FY23, plans to go public in 3-4 years,” July 2023
• Business Standard, “RBI asks Razorpay, Cashfree to temporarily stop onboarding of new customers,” December 2022
• Business Standard, “Easebuzz secures authorisation to operate as full-stack payment aggregator,” November 2025
• Entrepreneur India, “Easebuzz Raises USD 30 Million in Series A Round Led by Bessemer Venture Partners,” April 2025
• Easebuzz, press release, “Easebuzz secures all three key payment licenses from RBI for Online, Offline and cross border payments,” November 2025
• Yahoo Finance, “Easebuzz gains India’s RBI nod to function as full-service payment aggregator,” November 2025
• YourStory, “How this new-age fintech innovator is creating a buzz,” October 2021
• Ministry of Corporate Affairs / Zaubacorp, Easebuzz Private Limited corporate record (CIN U72200PN2014PTC153535), accessed September 2026

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