FlexiLoans has pushed more than ₹10,000 crore (about $1.04 billion, at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026, Trading Economics) into small businesses that Indian banks routinely turn away, a cumulative-disbursement milestone the company and Entrepreneur India confirmed in June 2025, with the investor Accion separately putting the figure at roughly $1,200 million disbursed across 2,100-plus towns. Yet the Mumbai-based digital lender spent its first seven years surviving two separate near-collapses, and did not report its first full year of profit until FY23, when annual revenue was still a modest ₹108.5 crore.
That gap between the headline disbursement number and the company’s own thin, hard-won margins is the real story of FlexiLoans. It is an RBI-registered non-banking financial company built to lend to India’s micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) without collateral, using algorithmic underwriting instead of the paperwork and property banks demand. Three chartered accountants and an IIT-trained data scientist built it after watching, at close range, how small business owners borrowed at 30-36% a year from local moneylenders because no bank would look at them. What follows traces the founding insight, the two crises that nearly ended the company, the funding that kept it alive, and the numbers — audited and reported — behind a business that is profitable, but only just.
Quick facts
| Company | FlexiLoans — brand of FlexiLoans Technologies Private Limited, lending carried out through group NBFC Epimoney Private Limited |
| Founded | 2016 (founding team came together in 2015); FlexiLoans Technologies Private Limited incorporated 6 February 2016, Mumbai (CIN U74120MH2016PTC272771) |
| Founder(s) | Deepak Jain, Manish Lunia and Ritesh Jain; a fourth co-founder, Abhishek Kothari, has since exited the company |
| Businesses | Collateral-free digital term loans, lines of credit and merchant cash advances for MSMEs, largely originated through co-lending with banks and larger NBFCs |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹262 crore, FY24 (year to March 2024) |
| Latest FY profit/loss | ₹3.3 crore net profit, FY24 — down 50% from FY23’s ₹6.67 crore |
| Listed | Private; no IPO filed as of September 2026 |
| Market value / last valuation | Not publicly disclosed in any of the priced rounds reviewed for this piece |
| Key shareholders / backers | Fundamentum, Accion Digital Transformation, British International Investment, Maj Invest, Nuveen, Fasanara Capital, and the family office of Sanjay and Falguni Nayar |
What they do
FlexiLoans lends to Indian micro, small and medium enterprises that mainstream banks either reject or make wait weeks for a decision. Its loans run from roughly ₹50,000 to ₹1 crore, are approved and disbursed within 48 hours in most cases, and require no collateral — the underwriting instead leans on a proprietary model that the company says reads more than 10,000 data points per applicant, from GST filings and bank statements to transaction data shared by lending partners such as e-commerce marketplaces and payment gateways. The customer base skews towards businesses that traditional lenders find hardest to score: as of June 2025, the company said 66% of its borrowers came from Tier II, III and IV towns, and more than 10% of its loan book sat with women-led enterprises, per Entrepreneur India’s report that month.
The origin
The founding idea did not come from a spreadsheet. Deepak Jain, an Axis Bank banker turned entrepreneur, has described watching his own father, a jeweller, borrow working capital from local moneylenders at 30-36% a year because no bank would extend a business loan below ₹10 lakh to a shop of that size, an account he gave in a profile carried by Forbes India in September 2023. Jain met Manish Lunia and Ritesh Jain, both chartered accountants, at the Indian School of Business, where the three did their MBA together in 2008-09; Lunia had spent years in treasury and policy roles before moving into financial services at the Aditya Birla Group, and Ritesh Jain had worked across revenue assurance, telecom technology and internal audit before becoming CFO at Housing.com. The three brought in Abhishek Kothari, an IIT Bombay graduate who had worked in data science for financial services firms, to build the underwriting engine, and the four launched FlexiLoans.com in 2016, according to TheFinanceStory’s account published in June 2023.
Their diagnosis, repeated across founder interviews, was structural rather than sentimental: roughly 30 million Indian MSMEs generate the bulk of the country’s non-farm employment, yet the overwhelming majority of their loan applications get turned down by banks for lacking the financial documentation or fixed-asset collateral that conventional credit assessment demands. FlexiLoans set out to replace that paperwork test with a data test, using digital footprints instead of audited balance sheets to decide who could be trusted with unsecured credit, and to do it fast enough that a shopkeeper did not have to shut for a fortnight waiting on a bank’s committee.
The struggle years
The idea survived several moments that could have ended it. The founding team itself was fragile at first: all three chartered accountant co-founders resigned their jobs within six months of deciding to build FlexiLoans together in 2015, per TheFinanceStory, and the venture ran on personal savings and roughly its first 300 loans before any institutional seed money came in. Early investor conversations went nowhere, forcing the founders to bootstrap through 2016 rather than raise on the strength of a pitch alone.
The first real external shock landed within three years of launch. The 2018 collapse of infrastructure financier IL&FS triggered a broader liquidity freeze across India’s shadow-banking sector, and FlexiLoans, still a young NBFC with no deposit base of its own, found bank and mutual-fund lines to on-lend against suddenly much harder to secure, a period Inc42’s October 2023 retrospective on the company described as forcing it to “moderate growth expectations” through 2019. The response was structural rather than defensive: the company pivoted a large share of its book towards co-lending, originating loans jointly with banks and larger NBFCs that supplied the balance-sheet capital FlexiLoans itself did not have, a shift both Inc42 and YourStory’s 2022 account of the company’s strategy trace to this period.
The second shock arrived in 2020. Inc42 recorded that FlexiLoans’ business “came to a screeching halt” between March and September 2020 as the COVID-19 lockdowns froze small-business cash flow nationwide; non-performing loans rose sharply and the company was forced into heavier provisioning just as new originations dried up. It raised ₹150 crore (about $18 million) in debt and equity that October, led by the family office of Sanjay and Falguni Nayar, according to Inc42’s contemporaneous funding report, capital the company used to rebuild its lending book and shore up its balance sheet through the recovery.
The turning point
The point at which FlexiLoans stopped being a story about survival and became a story about a working lending business was September 2022, when the company began recording positive months consistently, per Inc42’s account. The numbers either side of that shift are stark. In FY22, FlexiLoans posted revenue of ₹51.5 crore against a net loss of ₹10.77 crore, according to Entrackr’s September 2023 report on the company’s filings. By FY23, on revenue that had more than doubled to ₹108.5 crore, it closed its first full profitable year with a net profit of ₹6.67 crore — a swing of roughly ₹17.4 crore in the bottom line inside a single fiscal year, achieved while assets under management roughly doubled from about ₹500 crore in June 2022 to ₹1,000 crore by April 2023, per Forbes India’s September 2023 profile of the company. Co-founder Deepak Jain attributed the turn to reaching profitability “at a relatively early AUM compared to peers,” crediting a frugal cost base and the operating leverage that co-lending gave the business, in the same Forbes India account.
The money behind it
FlexiLoans has raised capital in a mix of pure equity, quasi-equity and debt lines used to fund its loan book, rather than one clean sequence of priced venture rounds, which is typical for an NBFC that needs on-balance-sheet capital as much as it needs growth equity. The traceable rounds:
- October 2020: ₹150 crore (about $18 million) in debt and equity, led by the family office of Sanjay and Falguni Nayar — capital that rebuilt the balance sheet after the 2020 COVID shock (Inc42, October 2020).
- June 2022: $90 million Series B, split roughly between $28 million of equity and the remainder in debt, from Denmark’s Maj Invest, UK-based Fasanara Capital and existing backers including the Nayar family office — the capital that funded the FY22-FY23 scale-up to ₹1,000 crore AUM (Entrackr, June 2022; Forbes India, September 2023).
- September 2024: ₹290 crore (about $35 million) from Accion Digital Transformation, Fundamentum, Nuveen and Maj Invest, alongside separate debt lines of $9 million from JM Financial and $7 million from Vivriti AMC in the same year (Entrackr, September 2024).
- June 2025: ₹375 crore (about $44 million) Series C extension led by the existing group of Fundamentum, Accion Digital Transformation, Nuveen and Maj Invest, joined by new investor British International Investment (BII), the UK’s development finance institution, structured as a mix of primary equity and secondary liquidity for existing shareholders (Entrackr, June 2025; Accion, June 2025; Business Standard, June 2025).
Entrackr put cumulative financing, combining debt and equity across every round to that point, at more than ₹2,500 crore as of September 2024; adding the ₹375 crore raised in June 2025 takes the lifetime tally to roughly ₹2,875 crore. That is broadly in line with CB Insights’ independently tracked total of $313.2 million across ten rounds, given the two figures are measured in different currencies at different points in time. No priced valuation for FlexiLoans appears in any of the funding reports reviewed for this piece; where aggregator sites cite a specific valuation figure, it could not be corroborated against a primary source and has been left out. What each backer changed is visible in the record: the Nayar family office’s 2020 cheque came at the point investor confidence in NBFCs was weakest post-IL&FS and signalled the company was still fundable; Maj Invest and Fasanara’s 2022 Series B funded the AUM doubling that led to first-year profit; and BII’s 2025 entry, as a development-finance institution with an explicit underserved-market mandate, tracks with FlexiLoans’ own emphasis on Tier II-IV lending.
How it makes money
FlexiLoans earns the way most NBFC lenders do — on the spread between what it costs the company to source capital and what it charges borrowers, plus fees — but its mix is unusually tilted towards fee income and towards other institutions’ balance sheets rather than its own.
- Interest income: ₹72.84 crore in FY23, or roughly 67% of collections that year, earned on loans priced at 15-24% annually, which the company and Forbes India describe as competitive against an industry range of 19-24% for comparable unsecured MSME credit (Entrackr, September 2023; Forbes India, September 2023).
- Loan processing fees: ₹33.7 crore in FY23, the second-largest revenue line, charged upfront on origination regardless of the loan’s eventual performance (Entrackr, September 2023).
- Bad-debt recoveries: a smaller ₹2 crore in FY23, from collections on previously written-off loans (Entrackr, September 2023).
- Co-lending as the margin lever: Forbes India reported that roughly 70% of FlexiLoans’ AUM growth has come through off-balance-sheet co-lending partnerships with roughly ten banks and larger NBFCs, where FlexiLoans originates and underwrites the loan but shares the capital and the credit risk with the partner — a model that lets it grow loan volume faster than its own balance sheet, or the equity raised to support it, would otherwise allow.
- The part people get wrong: the headline disbursement number (₹10,000-crore-plus cumulative) is not FlexiLoans’ own credit exposure. Because so much of the book sits off-balance-sheet with co-lending partners, the company’s revenue and profit are a small fraction of the capital it has helped move — which is also why a lender that has originated over ₹10,000 crore in loans is still only turning single-digit-crore annual profit.
On the cost side, the largest FY23 expense lines were employee benefits (₹25.9 crore, up 55.1% year-on-year), loan documentation costs (₹19.1 crore, up 109%) and finance costs (₹15.4 crore), against total expenses of ₹107.8 crore that year, a 53.3% jump from ₹70.4 crore in FY22 (Entrackr, September 2023). The company has kept its cost of credit below 4% for two straight years and its non-performing loans below 2%, against an industry range Forbes India put at 4-7% for comparable unsecured MSME lenders.
The numbers
Figures below are as reported in company filings covered by Entrackr; all amounts in ₹ crore.
| Fiscal year | Revenue (₹ crore) | Net profit / (loss) (₹ crore) |
| FY22 (year to March 2022) | 51.5 | (10.77) |
| FY23 (year to March 2023) | 108.5 | 6.67 |
| FY24 (year to March 2024) | 262 | 3.3 |
- FY23 revenue more than doubled year-on-year (2.1X, from FY22’s ₹51.5 crore) as the company turned its first full-year profit (Entrackr, September 2023).
- FY24 revenue grew 2.4X year-on-year to ₹262 crore, but net profit fell 50% to ₹3.3 crore, as expansion costs outran fee and interest income growth (Entrackr, September 2024).
- FY23 operating metrics: return on capital employed of 4.06% and EBITDA margin of 22.03%, per Entrackr’s review of that year’s filing.
Where the money comes from
FlexiLoans does not break out a formal product-wise or state-wise revenue split in public filings, but the company’s own operating disclosures, corroborated across two independent reports, show a clear geographic and channel concentration:
- Geography: 66% of borrowers as of June 2025 were based in Tier II, III and IV towns rather than metro India, and the loan book spanned more than 3,000 towns and cities by that point, up from roughly 2,100 towns reported by Accion a year earlier and 2,000-plus cities reported by Entrackr in September 2024 — a steady widening of reach into smaller-town India (Entrepreneur India, June 2025; Accion, June 2025; Entrackr, September 2024).
- Origination channel: partnerships, not direct-to-borrower marketing, source most of the volume — the company counted 100-plus ecosystem partners in FY23, including e-commerce, payments and point-of-sale platforms, growing to more than 400 partners by September 2024 (Entrackr, September 2023 and September 2024).
- Balance-sheet split: roughly 70% of AUM growth runs through off-balance-sheet co-lending with around ten bank and NBFC partners, meaning the bulk of the capital risk on FlexiLoans’ headline loan book sits with those partner institutions rather than with FlexiLoans itself (Forbes India, September 2023).
- The surprise: a lender built around underserved Tier II-IV MSMEs reports women-led enterprises at just over 10% of its portfolio and first-time borrowers as “a significant portion” of its customer base — meaning a meaningful share of its growth still comes from bringing entirely new borrowers into formal credit for the first time, rather than refinancing customers who already had a credit history (Entrepreneur India, June 2025).
The risks
- Crowded competitive set: FlexiLoans competes for the same unsecured MSME borrower against much larger balance sheets, from Bajaj Finance to fellow digital-first NBFCs such as Lendingkart, NeoGrowth and Oxyzo, several of which can price more aggressively or absorb credit losses over a longer runway, a competitive pressure Forbes India’s September 2023 profile flagged directly.
- Collections risk baked into the model: unsecured, collateral-free lending to first-time or thin-file borrowers is, in Forbes India’s phrase, fundamentally “a business of collections” — FlexiLoans has kept NPAs under 2% against an industry range of 4-7%, but that gap has to be defended every quarter as the book scales into smaller towns with thinner credit history, not assumed to hold automatically.
- Thin and volatile margins on a co-lending-heavy model: FY24’s results show the risk plainly — revenue grew 2.4X but profit fell 50% in the same year, because loan documentation costs rose 109% and employee costs rose 55.1% in the prior year alone (Entrackr, September 2023 and September 2024); a business earning single-digit-crore profit on a book largely funded by partner banks is exposed if co-lending partners tighten terms or pull back capital in a credit downturn.
The takeaway
The lesson in FlexiLoans’ record is not that persistence eventually pays, though it did. It is that surviving two sector-wide credit crises did not, by itself, make the underlying business generous. FlexiLoans reached its first profitable year on revenue of just ₹108.5 crore after seven years of trying, and then saw that profit halve the very next year even as revenue nearly quadrupled from its earlier base, because the underwriting model it built to reach borrowers banks would not touch also means carrying the operating cost of collecting from them. A company can be structurally necessary — extending formal credit to businesses locked out of it — and still be a low-margin business for a very long time. The founders’ own answer has been to keep growing the co-lending share of the book rather than the balance-sheet share, effectively renting other institutions’ risk appetite instead of building a bigger one of its own. Whether that keeps working depends on how many banks stay willing to co-lend into Tier II-IV India when the next credit cycle turns, not on how many small businesses want the money.
Frequently asked questions
Who founded FlexiLoans and when?
FlexiLoans was founded by chartered accountants Deepak Jain, Manish Lunia and Ritesh Jain along with IIT Bombay graduate Abhishek Kothari, who has since exited the company; the founding team came together in 2015 and launched operations in 2016, per TheFinanceStory’s June 2023 account and Forbes India’s September 2023 profile.
Is FlexiLoans profitable?
Yes, but narrowly. It reported its first full year of net profit in FY23 (₹6.67 crore on ₹108.5 crore revenue), and remained profitable in FY24 with a smaller net profit of ₹3.3 crore on revenue of ₹262 crore, according to Entrackr’s reporting on the company’s filings for both years.
How much money has FlexiLoans raised, and at what valuation?
Traceable rounds and debt lines take lifetime financing to roughly ₹2,875 crore as of June 2025 (Entrackr), broadly consistent with CB Insights’ independently tracked total of $313.2 million. No priced valuation for the company appears in the primary funding reports reviewed for this piece.
How does FlexiLoans actually make money if it doesn’t hold most of its loan book?
It earns interest income and, more distinctively, loan processing fees on origination, whether or not it holds the loan long-term. Because roughly 70% of AUM growth runs through co-lending partnerships where banks and larger NBFCs supply most of the capital, FlexiLoans’ own revenue and profit stay a small fraction of the headline loan volume it originates (Forbes India, September 2023).
What is the biggest risk to FlexiLoans’ business model?
Its dependence on co-lending partners for the majority of its loan book’s capital, combined with the inherently higher collections cost of unsecured, collateral-free lending to first-time MSME borrowers — a combination that showed up directly in FY24, when profit halved even as revenue grew 2.4 times.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Inc42, “After Six Years Of Resilience, How FlexiLoans Emerged Profitable In The High-Risk MSME Lending Arena,” October 2023
- Inc42, “FlexiLoans Raises INR 150 Cr In Debt And Equity Financing From Investors,” October 2020
- Entrackr, “FlexiLoans crosses Rs 100 Cr revenue in FY23, turns profitable,” September 2023
- Entrackr, “FlexiLoans raises $90 Mn in Series B round,” June 2022
- Entrackr, “FlexiLoans raises $35 Mn from Accion, Fundamentum, and others,” September 2024
- Entrackr, “FlexiLoans raises Rs 375 Cr in extended Series C round,” June 2025
- Accion, “FlexiLoans Raises $80Mn in 6 Months, Closes Latest ~$45Mn in Series C Round to Empower Indian MSMEs,” June 2025
- Business Standard, “FlexiLoans raises Rs 375 crore in Series C funding led by BII, others,” June 2025
- Forbes India, “How FlexiLoans grew quickly yet profitably,” September 2023
- TheFinanceStory, “How 3 CAs and a tech guy built India’s leading digital lending platform ‘FlexiLoans’ to serve the underbanked at a click,” June 2023
- Entrepreneur India, “FlexiLoans Crosses INR 10,000 Cr in Loan Disbursements, Powers 1.7 Lakh MSME Loans,” June 2025
- YourStory, “Why FlexiLoans decided to focus on digital lending for SMBs,” July 2022
- Zaubacorp / Ministry of Corporate Affairs record for FLEXILOANS TECHNOLOGIES PRIVATE LIMITED (CIN U74120MH2016PTC272771), accessed September 2026
- FlexiLoans company website, “About FlexiLoans,” accessed September 2026
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