Startup Deep Dive : i2iFunding — revenue jumped 109% even as its funding stayed under Rs 9 crore

i2iFunding, a Noida-based peer-to-peer lending platform, reported revenue of ₹14.1 crore (about $1.5 million, at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026) for the year to March 2025, up 108.6% from ₹6.8 crore a year earlier, as tracked by Inc42 and independently corroborated by The Company Check from the same regulatory filings. Yet the company behind it, RNVP Technology Private Limited, has disclosed barely ₹8.75 crore in outside equity since it was founded in 2015 — a fraction of the ₹76.6 lakh in penalties the Reserve Bank of India handed four rival P2P platforms in March 2025 for breaking rules that i2iFunding has spent a decade trying to stay inside of.

That contradiction — a small, thinly funded lender-matching platform posting triple-digit revenue growth in the same year its entire industry was forced into a regulatory reset — is the story of i2iFunding. It survived a decade of India’s peer-to-peer lending experiment by staying registered, staying small, and staying out of the RBI’s enforcement column, even as the ground rules under it shifted twice in eighteen months.

Quick facts

What i2iFunding does

i2iFunding runs a digital marketplace that connects people with spare money to lend against people who need to borrow it, operating under a Non-Banking Financial Company – Peer to Peer Lending Platform (NBFC-P2P) licence granted by the Reserve Bank of India in September 2018, under Certificate of Registration number N-12.00468. As an NBFC-P2P, the company is barred by RBI’s own Directions from lending its own money or taking loans onto its balance sheet — it earns only by matching, assessing and servicing loans that lenders fund directly. A 2019 company release distributed via PR Newswire described the core product as unsecured personal loans of up to ₹10 lakh, aimed at self-employed individuals, newly salaried professionals and borrowers with thin or no credit history who are routinely turned away by banks and larger NBFCs.

• Personal loans for debt consolidation, medical bills, education costs, consumer-durable purchases, home renovation and similar needs, per i2iFunding’s own product pages.
• Small-business and working-capital loans for self-employed and MSME borrowers who need to fund a cash-cycle gap or expand a small operation.
• Credit assessment that the company says goes beyond a CIBIL score, using a proprietary model built on dozens of additional data points to price and approve loans that traditional lenders would decline outright.
• A fully digital, pan-India model run out of a single Noida office rather than a branch network, which keeps the company’s disclosed headcount at roughly 25 employees, per Inc42’s tracking.

The origin

The idea for i2iFunding did not come from a whiteboard exercise. As the founders have recounted in profiles of the company, the trigger was watching a colleague get turned down for a personal loan by a bank and then have to borrow from an unregulated moneylender at a punishing rate of interest simply to cover a short-term need. That single, ordinary failure of the formal credit system became the founding thesis: there was a large pool of creditworthy-but-unbanked borrowers on one side, and a large pool of individuals willing to earn a better return than a fixed deposit on the other, with no honest, RBI-supervised marketplace connecting the two. Vaibhav Kumar Pandey, one of the co-founders and now CEO, brought an unusual first career to the problem: after training in nautical sciences at T.S. Chanakya and sailing as a navigation officer on merchant ships, he spent six years after his 2009 MBA from IIM Ahmedabad in operations and business-excellence roles, building large-scale processes from scratch. He teamed up with Raghavendra Pratap Singh, Neha Aggarwal, Manisha Bansal and Abhinav Johary — a group drawn from IIM Ahmedabad and IIM Calcutta — to launch i2iFunding in 2015, betting that operational discipline, not just a lending algorithm, would be what separated a P2P platform that survived from one that did not.

The struggle years

The first hard lesson arrived within a year of launch. Unsecured lending to thin-file borrowers means defaults are not a hypothetical risk but a routine cost, and by August 2016 i2iFunding had already built a Principal Protection Fund, setting aside 5% of every disbursed loan to cushion lenders against exactly that outcome, according to a company announcement covered by Crowdfund Insider. The fund was not a marketing flourish: by June 2017, i2iFunding said it had paid out ₹2.25 lakh to 39 investors to offset principal lost to bad debt, a move press coverage at the time described as a first for an Indian P2P platform. It was proof the underlying credit model needed active loss management from year one, not proof that the model was safe.

The second setback was regulatory rather than operational, and it lasted longer. When the RBI issued its first P2P lending framework in October 2017, it capped how much any individual lender could put through a single platform at ₹10 lakh. For i2iFunding, that cap cut directly against its plan to bring in larger, wealthier lenders: co-founder Raghavendra Pratap Singh said at the time that the typical minimum exposure a high-net-worth individual was willing to commit ran from ₹2.5 crore to ₹5 crore, making a ₹10 lakh ceiling all but irrelevant to that pool of capital, as reported by Business Standard. The restriction did more than annoy a few large lenders — it choked off exactly the kind of scaled, wholesale capital that a young NBFC-P2P needed to grow disbursals quickly, and it stayed in force for roughly a year and a half before the RBI began signalling, in April 2019, that it would consider raising the ceiling toward ₹25 lakh.

The turning point

The moment that mattered most for i2iFunding was not a funding round but a licence. In September 2018, the company received its formal NBFC-P2P certification from the RBI, becoming the sixth platform in the country to be registered under the new framework, as reported independently by both MediaNama and Business Standard that month. Before that certificate, i2iFunding was operating in a regulatory grey zone shared by every early P2P platform in India — legal, but without the explicit supervisory backing that made larger, risk-averse lenders comfortable committing real money. After it, the company could credibly present itself as an RBI-supervised NBFC rather than an unregulated marketplace. The numbers on either side of that line make the shift concrete: within ten months of certification, i2iFunding said it had crossed ₹36 crore in cumulative disbursals and a monthly disbursal run-rate of ₹4 crore, and in June 2019 SucSEED Venture Partners came back for what it called its single largest investment in any startup to that point — a ₹1.75 crore follow-on round, reported by YourStory and PR Newswire. A licence, not a product tweak, is what let i2iFunding ask investors and lenders to trust it at a materially larger scale.

The money behind it

• May 2016 — angel round: approximately ₹2 crore (about $300,000) from a group of unnamed angel investors, i2iFunding’s first outside capital after bootstrapped launch (Crowdfund Insider, August 2016; Inc42 funding data).
• March 2018 — angel round: approximately ₹5 crore ($767,000, per Inc42), led by SucSEED Venture Partners together with angel investor Manish Poddar, a serial entrepreneur, alongside a group of angel investors (BW Disrupt, March 2018; Inc42 funding data).
• June 2019 — follow-on round: ₹1.75 crore from SucSEED Venture Partners, which the fund described as its largest single investment in a startup at that point, coming shortly after i2iFunding’s RBI certification and rising disbursal run-rate (YourStory, June 2019; PR Newswire, June 2019; Business Standard, June 2019).
• Total disclosed funding: roughly ₹8.75 crore (about $1.07 million, per Inc42’s tracking) across three rounds between 2016 and 2019 — no fresh equity round has been publicly reported since.
• What each backer changed: the 2016 angels supplied the seed capital needed to meet the RBI’s early net-owned-fund requirements for a P2P applicant; Manish Poddar and SucSEED’s 2018 cheque arrived just before the RBI certification and funded the compliance and technology build-out that certification required; SucSEED’s 2019 follow-on came once disbursals were already scaling, functioning as growth capital rather than survival capital.

How it makes money

Because RBI’s NBFC-P2P Directions forbid a platform like i2iFunding from lending its own money, holding loans on its books or offering any credit guarantee, every rupee of its revenue is fee income earned for matching, underwriting and servicing a loan that a named lender funds directly.

• Money in: processing and platform fees charged around loan origination, plus servicing fees tied to managing repayments over the life of the loan — the specific fee percentages are not published by the company and could not be independently verified for this piece.
• Costs out: credit-assessment and collections infrastructure, technology and compliance overhead tied to RBI reporting obligations, and the cost of maintaining the escrow-account architecture that all fund flows must now pass through.
• Where the margin sits: in the spread between what it costs i2iFunding to originate and service a loan digitally at low headcount (around 25 employees, per Inc42) and the fee it can charge without pricing borrowers out of the product entirely.
• What people get wrong: many assume a P2P platform is effectively an alternative bank that absorbs losses the way i2iFunding’s own Principal Protection Fund once did — reserving 5% of disbursed value to cover defaults. RBI’s August 2024 amendment to the NBFC-P2P Directions explicitly bans P2P platforms from offering credit guarantees or any risk-mitigation product of that kind, meaning the loss-absorption model i2iFunding pioneered in 2016 is no longer a feature it — or any RBI-registered peer — can legally offer. Lenders on the platform now carry default risk directly.

The numbers

i2iFunding’s revenue nearly tripled between FY24 and FY25, though profit-and-loss figures were not found in the public trackers reviewed for this piece and are not included rather than estimated. Two consecutive years of disclosed revenue, rather than the fuller three-to-four-year run the company’s small size makes hard to source publicly, are shown below; unit is ₹ crore.

Both figures come from Inc42’s company financial tracker, which cites RNVP Technology’s own regulatory filings, and were independently corroborated by The Company Check, which lists FY25 revenue at ₹14.08 crore, up 109.0% year-on-year — a match close enough to treat the underlying number as confirmed. Earlier-year revenue (FY22, FY23) and any profit-or-loss figure were not available in the filings-based trackers checked for this piece and have accordingly been left out rather than approximated.

Where the money comes from

• Product mix: unsecured personal loans (debt consolidation, medical, education, consumer-durable and similar purposes) alongside small-business and MSME working-capital loans, per i2iFunding’s own product pages — the company does not publish a revenue split between the two.
• Geography: a single, fully digital pan-India model operated out of one office in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, rather than a city-by-city branch rollout.
• Lender base: individual retail lenders form the core of i2iFunding’s funding supply, a structural feature of every NBFC-P2P platform and one the RBI’s August 2024 Directions amendment reinforced by capping any single lender’s cumulative exposure across all P2P platforms at ₹50 lakh.
• The surprise: a platform whose entire pitch is connecting capital to borrowers has, by regulatory design, never been allowed to say how it splits revenue between personal and business lending, or to disclose profitability — the RBI’s Fair Practices Code governs borrower-facing disclosure, not the platform’s own segment reporting, so the “segment split” that a lender or investor might want simply is not public information for a company this size.

The risks

• Active regulatory scrutiny: in January 2025, the RBI sent an unprecedented operational questionnaire to eight P2P lenders, i2iFunding among them, seeking details on compliance with the new escrow, fund-transfer and disclosure rules by 3 January 2025 — a first-of-its-kind data request, according to MediaNama’s reporting that month, that signalled the regulator was moving from rule-setting to active supervision of named platforms.
• Sector-wide enforcement precedent: in March 2025, the RBI fined four registered NBFC-P2P platforms — Faircent, Finzy, Visionary Financepeer and Rang De — a cumulative ₹76.6 lakh for violations including disbursing loans without specific lender approval and assuming credit risk beyond what an intermediary is permitted, per MediaNama. i2iFunding was not named among the fined platforms, but the action shows the RBI is now willing to penalise, not just questionnaire, platforms that stray from intermediary-only status.
• A tighter operating model than the one it built its name on: the August 2024 Directions amendment banned credit guarantees, banned early-withdrawal or liquidity options, mandated manual (rather than algorithmic) borrower selection by each lender, and required T+1 transfer of escrow funds — a wholesale rewrite of how every NBFC-P2P platform, i2iFunding included, is allowed to operate, confirmed independently by AuthBridge and Business Today’s reporting from August 2024. Platforms across the sector reported halting new business temporarily to rebuild systems around the new rules.

The takeaway

i2iFunding’s decade is less a growth story than a compliance story that happens to have produced growth. The company never raised the kind of capital that would let it out-market or out-spend its larger peers, and it never built a loan book of its own to fall back on — by regulatory design, it could not. What it did instead was keep its RBI registration current through three separate rewrites of the rulebook, absorb an early default scare by inventing a loss-sharing mechanism before the regulator later banned that very mechanism, and keep disbursing through a period when peers were being fined for cutting corners on exactly the intermediary role i2iFunding stayed inside of. For a founder in a tightly regulated, thin-margin marketplace business, the transferable lesson is not to build the most creative product; it is to make staying compliant, boring and small survivable long enough for the market to catch up to what the rules will eventually allow.

Frequently asked questions

Is i2iFunding an RBI-registered company?

Yes. i2iFunding operates under RNVP Technology Private Limited, which holds an NBFC-P2P Certificate of Registration (number N-12.00468) from the Reserve Bank of India, granted in September 2018, as reported by both MediaNama and Business Standard that month.

How much funding has i2iFunding raised?

Inc42’s funding tracker records roughly ₹8.75 crore (about $1.07 million) across three disclosed rounds between May 2016 and June 2019, led primarily by SucSEED Venture Partners along with angel investor Manish Poddar and a group of unnamed angels. No new equity round has been publicly reported since 2019.

What is i2iFunding’s latest revenue?

i2iFunding reported revenue of ₹14.1 crore for FY25 (year to March 2025), up 108.6% from ₹6.8 crore in FY24, according to Inc42’s tracking of the company’s filings, a figure corroborated independently by The Company Check.

How do RBI’s 2024 P2P lending rules affect i2iFunding?

The RBI’s August 2024 Directions amendment banned credit guarantees and liquidity/early-exit options, capped a lender’s total P2P exposure at ₹50 lakh, mandated manual borrower selection and required same-day (T+1) transfer of escrow funds — rules that apply to every NBFC-P2P platform, including i2iFunding, and that the sector’s own operators described as forcing a temporary halt to new business while systems were rebuilt.

Has i2iFunding faced any RBI penalties?

No penalty against i2iFunding specifically was found in the sources reviewed for this piece. In January 2025 it was one of eight platforms sent an RBI operational-compliance questionnaire, per MediaNama, and in March 2025 the RBI fined four other NBFC-P2P platforms — Faircent, Finzy, Visionary Financepeer and Rang De — a combined ₹76.6 lakh; i2iFunding was not among them.

Sources

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

• Inc42, company financial and funding tracker for i2ifunding, accessed September 2026
• The Company Check, RNVP Technology Private Limited profile, accessed September 2026
• MediaNama, “Lending platform i2iFunding.com gets NBFC-P2P certification from RBI,” September 2018
• Business Standard (ANI), “i2iFunding receives NBFC-P2P certification from RBI,” September 2018
• MediaNama, “After New Guidelines, RBI Seeks Operational Insights From P2P Lenders,” January 2025
• MediaNama, “RBI Fines P2P Platforms Over Rs 75 Lakh For Guideline Violations,” March 2025
• AuthBridge, “RBI Updated P2P Lending Guidelines: All You Need To Know,” August 2024
• Business Today, “Why RBI’s new guidelines have halted the P2P lending industry,” August 2024
• Business Standard, “P2P lending firms to get a leg up with easing of investment cap,” April 2019
• YourStory, “P2P lending platform i2iFunding raises Rs 1.75 Cr from SucSEED Venture Partners,” June 2019
• PR Newswire India, “SucSEED Backs i2iFunding Second Time,” June 2019
• Crowdfund Insider, “i2ifunding Unveils Investor Protection Fund,” August 2016
• BW Disrupt, “P2P Lending Platform, i2ifunding.com, Raises Second Round of Angel Investment of About Rs 5 Cr,” March 2018
• ZaubaCorp, RNVP Technology Private Limited corporate filing record, accessed September 2026
• i2iFunding, company website product and about pages, accessed September 2026

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