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

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The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for Easebuzz.

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

Company Easebuzz Private Limited (incorporated as SRV Media Technologies Private Limited)
Founded Incorporated 23 December 2014; operations launched 2016 (MCA/Zaubacorp records)
Founder(s) Rohit Prasad (CEO and Managing Director) and Amit Kumar (CTO and Director), both Symbiosis postgraduates
Businesses RBI-authorised payment aggregator: online, offline (PoS/UPI Soundbox) and cross-border payment collections, payouts and B2B payment APIs for SMEs
Latest FY revenue ₹656 crore (~$68.3 million) in FY25, up 2.3x year-on-year (Entrackr/Inc42, October 2025)
Latest FY profit/loss ₹18.8 crore net profit in FY25, up roughly 46x from ₹37.7 lakh in FY24 (Entrackr, October 2025)
Listed Private; company has stated an IPO target of “2–3 years” as of a September 2024 statement (Business Standard)
Market value / last valuation Estimated $195–200 million post-money after its April 2025 Series A (Entrackr analysis of RoC filings); reportedly in talks for a further $30 million at close to $250 million in December 2025 (Entrackr, unconfirmed by the company)
Key shareholders Bessemer Venture Partners (lead investor, April 2025), 8i Ventures (10.9%), Varanium Capital (8.5%); founder Rohit Prasad held about 27.8% pre-Series A dilution (Entrackr, April 2025)

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

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

Fiscal year Revenue (₹ crore) Net profit (₹ crore)
FY22 122.8 Not disclosed in sourced filings
FY23 236.0 ~1.0 (EBITDA ₹4 crore)
FY24 289.2 0.38
FY25 656.0 18.8

Where the money comes from

The risks

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).

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