Jar’s revenue jumped fifty-fold in one year, to ₹2,447.8 crore ($255 million) in FY25. Almost none of that jump was Jar actually earning more from users: it was an accounting change, and the app’s real take for the year was ₹208 crore. Nine months later, a Karnataka court refused to quash a police case that asks a blunter question about the same business — whether “daily savings into gold” is, in law, an unregulated deposit scheme.
Jar is the app that turned gold-buying into a habit for tier-2 and tier-3 India: round up your UPI spends, or set aside ₹10 a day, and it lands in digital gold. Fifteen months after Tiger Global backed it at a $300 million valuation, Jar is smaller, more profitable on paper, and under more legal scrutiny than at any point in its five-year life. This is the story of how a savings app grew fast enough to worry a regulator, and cheap enough to worry its own investors.
Quick facts
| Company | Jar Gold Retail Private Limited (app: Jar) |
| Founded | 2021, Bengaluru |
| Founder(s) | Nishchay AG (CEO) and Misbah Ashraf (co-founder, chief product officer) |
| Businesses | Digital gold micro-savings (Jar); online jewellery marketplace (Nek); peer-to-peer lending distribution with LenDenClub |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹208 crore operating revenue; ₹2,447.8 crore total revenue including gold sold as principal (FY25) |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Net loss ₹50.5 crore (FY25); company says it turned profitable from Q4 FY25 |
| Listed | Private; IPO discussions reported for 2026 |
| Market value / last valuation | ₹3,155 crore (about $329 million) as of September 2026 |
| Key shareholders | Tiger Global, Tribe Capital, Arkam Ventures, WEH Ventures, Rocketship VC, Unitary Fund |
What they do
Jar sells small, automated doses of digital gold to people who have never formally saved or invested before. A user links a UPI account, and Jar either rounds up each transaction to the nearest whole rupee amount and invests the spare change, or auto-debits a fixed daily sum starting at ₹10, converting it into 24-karat digital gold that Jar says is backed by an equivalent amount of physical gold held in vaults with its partners. The pitch is not wealth-building for the affluent; as per the company, more than 60% of its users come from tier-2 and tier-3 towns, and it says over 95% of them are first-time formal savers. On top of that savings habit, Jar has layered an online jewellery brand (Nek) and a lending distribution tie-up, turning a single daily nudge into a small financial-services bundle.
The origin
Nishchay AG and Misbah Ashraf had circled each other in India’s startup scene for close to a decade before Jar. Misbah, who grew up in Bihar Sharif in Nalanda district, had already built and sold a stake in Roposo, a short-video app for Indian creators later folded into Glance under InMobi, and had run the social-commerce platform Marsplay, which he exited in December 2020, as reported by Forbes India. Nishchay had been vice-president of lending at Navi, the financial-services group founded by Sachin Bansal, giving him a close look at how thinly formal credit and savings products reached India beyond its metros. The two founded Jar in 2021 in Bengaluru on a simple observation: Indians already trusted gold as a store of value more than they trusted mutual funds or stocks, but buying it meant walking into a jeweller with a lump sum. If a phone could turn ₹10 into a gram fraction of gold with no friction, saving could be made to happen automatically rather than through willpower, as Nishchay later put it, “daily savings is our hero feature, and that’s what most of our users use it for,” per TechCrunch.
The struggle years
Jar’s growth came at a cost that shows up starkly in its own filings. In FY23, the company spent ₹137.5 crore to earn revenue of just ₹8.7 crore, roughly ₹16 spent for every ₹1 earned, and its net loss widened 78.3% year-on-year to ₹123 crore, as reported by Entrackr and Inc42 from regulatory filings. That was the cost of building a user base largely through referral incentives, and it made the company heavily dependent on continued venture funding at a time when growth-stage fintech valuations globally were being marked down.
The bigger scare came later. In April 2025, a $50 million round led by Prosus, with Susquehanna International Group and existing backer Arkam Ventures, collapsed. Jar wanted a valuation of $300-350 million; the incoming investors were willing to pay $200-250 million, and the two sides could not close the gap. Talks were also complicated by the founders wanting to sell some of their own shares as part of the round, which the new investors opposed, according to Inc42’s reporting citing Moneycontrol. Eight months later, a second attempt fared no better in substance even though it started bigger: by December 2025, Jar was in advanced talks with WestBridge Capital for over $100 million at a $500-550 million valuation, with Kotak Investment Banking advising, per Entrackr. By September 2026, those talks had reportedly fizzled, and Jar ended up raising a fraction of that amount from an existing investor instead. Layered on top of the funding troubles, Karnataka police registered a criminal case against the company in January 2026 alleging its core product looks, in substance, like an unregulated deposit scheme — a threat not to Jar’s valuation but to the legality of the business itself, discussed in full under “The risks” below.
The turning point
The clearest before-and-after in Jar’s history sits across FY24 and FY25. Going into FY25, Jar was a five-year-old company that had just cut its loss 15% to ₹104 crore on revenue of ₹49 crore, still burning heavily relative to what it earned, and had just watched a $50 million rescue round fall apart over price. Coming out of FY25, two things had changed at once. First, Jar restructured its gold supply chain so that it began buying gold as principal and reselling it to users, rather than merely connecting them to a bullion partner; that single accounting shift, not a change in what users pay, is why total revenue reported in its books leapt roughly 50 times to ₹2,447.8 crore, a figure Jar itself has been careful to separate from its ₹208 crore of operating revenue, which grew a more modest ninefold, as detailed by Inc42 and Business Standard. Second, and more consequentially for the company’s survival, Jar said it turned profitable after tax in the fourth quarter of FY25 and stayed profitable in the first quarter of FY26, cutting its net loss for the full year to ₹50.5 crore from ₹104 crore, per TechCrunch’s September 2025 report and Inc42’s later filing-based confirmation. A company that had been the subject of a failed fundraise months earlier was, by its own account, no longer dependent on new capital to keep the lights on — a claim that would be tested within months by the regulatory case that followed.
The money behind it
Jar’s capital stack was built in three distinct phases. The first backers, Tribe Capital, Arkam Ventures and WEH Ventures, put in $4.5 million in a pre-Series A round in 2021 alongside angels including CRED founder Kunal Shah, validating the concept before it had meaningful scale, as reported by Entrackr and YourStory at the time. Tiger Global then took over as the anchor investor, leading a $32 million Series A in February 2022 at a valuation above $200 million, and returning five months later to lead a $22.6 million Series B in August 2022 that pushed the valuation past $300 million, per TechCrunch and Inc42 — the fastest and largest jump in Jar’s funding history, and the round that financed the aggressive, referral-driven marketing spend visible in its FY23 accounts. The company has raised a little over $65 million in aggregate across these rounds, according to TechCrunch’s 2025 tally, before a further ₹29 crore came in during 2026.
That last round is the clearest sign of how much investor sentiment has cooled. With the Prosus-led and WestBridge-led rounds both falling through, Jar turned to an existing investor, Unitary Fund, which put in ₹29 crore in September 2026 through 1,70,589 Series B2 compulsorily convertible preference shares priced at ₹1,700 each. That values Jar at roughly ₹3,155 crore (about $329 million at ₹96 to the dollar), a 23% step-up from its prior round value of about ₹2,565 crore, according to matching reports from Entrackr and CXO Digital Pulse, both published in September 2026. It is a real increase, but it is also a fraction of the $500-550 million that WestBridge had reportedly been willing to discuss three months earlier — a gap that says as much about how new investors are pricing regulatory risk into digital gold as it does about Jar’s operating improvement.
How it makes money
Jar’s core product does not charge a visible commission the way a brokerage does. Instead, it earns a spread built into the price at which it sells gold to users relative to what it costs Jar to source and store that gold, plus fees from the payment and storage partners it works with. Since FY25, Jar has taken on the role of principal seller of the gold itself rather than acting purely as a technology layer connecting users to a bullion partner, which concentrates gold-price and working-capital risk on Jar’s own balance sheet in exchange for a larger and more direct share of the margin. Beyond the core savings loop, Jar cross-sells jewellery through Nek, an online marketplace that uses a drop-shipment model with no inventory of its own, crossing ₹100 crore in annual revenue, according to Inc42’s reporting on the brand’s launch and TechCrunch’s 2025 coverage. It has also moved into lending distribution, partnering with NBFC LenDenClub from March 2024 to offer peer-to-peer lending products inside the app, as reported by Forbes India. The part most coverage of Jar gets wrong is treating its headline “revenue” figure as what the company earns: the ₹2,447.8 crore FY25 number is overwhelmingly the pass-through value of gold Jar buys and resells, not its take: the ₹208 crore operating-revenue line is the closer proxy for what Jar actually keeps.
The numbers
Figures below are drawn from Jar’s regulatory filings as reported by Entrackr, Inc42 and Business Standard. FY25’s “revenue from operations” is not strictly comparable with earlier years because of the principal-seller accounting change described above; it is included because it is the number Jar itself has pointed to as the closer measure of underlying business growth.
| Metric (₹ crore) | FY23 | FY24 | FY25 |
| Revenue from operations | 8.7 | 49.0 | 208.0 |
| Total income (incl. gold sold as principal in FY25) | 8.7 | 49.0 | 2,450.7 |
| Total expenses | 137.5 | 160.4 | 2,501.2 |
| Net loss | 123.0 | 104.0 | 50.5 |
| Loss before ESOP cost | n/a | n/a | 35.3 |
The trajectory of the loss line matters more here than any single year: from ₹123 crore in FY23, to ₹104 crore in FY24 (down 15%), to ₹50.5 crore in FY25 (down roughly 51%), even as the company says it has since posted two straight quarters of after-tax profit, per Inc42 and TechCrunch.
Where the money comes from
Jar’s user base is deliberately not metro-first: as per the company’s own figures reported by TechCrunch, more than 60% of its 35 million-plus registered users come from tier-2 and tier-3 towns, spread across more than 12,000 pin codes, and Jar says more than 95% of them had no prior formal savings or investment product. Nek, the jewellery arm, extends that geographic spread further, offering gold, silver, diamond and lab-grown-diamond pieces across more than 8,000 pin codes through a zero-inventory, drop-shipment model, and had already crossed ₹100 crore in annual revenue within roughly a year of launch, per Inc42. The lending tie-up with LenDenClub, launched in March 2024, adds a third, still-small revenue stream by distributing peer-to-peer loans to the same base.
The surprise sits in how that base was built. Jar’s viral growth in smaller towns leaned heavily on referral bonuses of 30-40% for bringing in new savers, a mechanism that worked extremely well as a distribution channel, according to the same filings examined in the Karnataka police case. It is also, according to that case, the specific feature that made regulators look twice: a referral structure of that size is one of the classic red flags investigators use to identify unregulated deposit-taking or pyramid-like schemes. The engine that built Jar’s tier-2/3 town base is, almost exactly, the feature now cited against it in court.
The risks
The most serious risk to Jar is not competitive; it is legal. In January 2026, Koramangala police in Bengaluru registered an FIR (Crime No. 25 of 2026) against Jar Gold Retail Private Limited and its directors — Nishchay Babu Arkalgud, Misbah Ashraf and Sandesh Nahar — under Sections 21(1) and 21(2) of the Banning of Unregulated Deposit Schemes Act, 2019, following a Reserve Bank of India market-surveillance alert on 20 July 2025 and a Securities and Exchange Board of India public notice on 8 November 2025 that both stated digital gold falls outside their regulatory perimeter. On 14 March 2026, the Karnataka High Court, in an order by Justice M. Nagaprasanna, refused to quash that FIR, holding that “law is concerned not with the cosmetic garb in which a transaction is clothed, but with its intrinsic character,” and that the BUDS Act’s language is wide enough to cover Jar’s daily-gold arrangement even if it is structured as a sale rather than a deposit, according to LiveLaw’s report on the judgment. The case cites roughly ₹4,000 crore in cumulative business volume and more than ₹100 crore collected from users through the referral-driven model. If a higher court eventually agrees that the product functions as a deposit, Jar would need a banking or NBFC-style licence it does not currently hold, or would have to restructure the core product entirely.
A second, related risk is that Jar’s headline growth is now harder to read from the outside. The FY25 shift to principal-seller accounting inflated reported revenue fifty-fold while operating revenue grew ninefold and gold-price risk moved onto Jar’s own books; any future investor, lender or IPO underwriter has to look past the ₹2,447.8 crore top line to the ₹208 crore that actually reflects the business. Third, Jar’s capital access has visibly narrowed: two attempted primary raises in 2025, worth $50 million and over $100 million respectively, both fell through, leaving the company to accept a ₹29 crore bridge from an existing investor in September 2026 at a valuation well below what WestBridge had reportedly discussed three months earlier. That combination — a live criminal case testing the legality of the core product, and new investors pricing that uncertainty in — leaves Jar’s next growth bets, including Nek and its lending tie-up, more capital-constrained than the company’s profitability claims alone would suggest.
The takeaway
Jar’s arc is a useful reminder that a growth engine and a compliance liability can be the exact same mechanism wearing different clothes. The 30-40% referral bonus that pulled tens of millions of first-time savers in tier-2 and tier-3 towns into daily gold purchases was, by most startup playbooks, working brilliantly; it is also the specific pattern a court has now said looks like an unregulated deposit scheme. Businesses built on frictionless recurring micro-payments into an asset the company itself holds should assume that regulators will eventually ask whether “buying gold daily” is functionally different from “depositing money regularly” — and should be able to answer that question before a police station does. Fixing the growth loop to remove that ambiguity, rather than defending it after the fact, is the harder and more transferable lesson here.
Frequently asked questions
What does Jar actually sell?
Jar sells digital gold in small, automated amounts, starting from ₹10 a day, funded through UPI round-ups or fixed auto-debits, which it says is backed by an equivalent quantity of physical gold. It has since added an online jewellery marketplace, Nek, and distributes peer-to-peer lending products from partner LenDenClub.
How much has Jar raised, and what is it worth?
Jar has raised a little over $65 million across its funding history, anchored by Tiger Global’s Series A and Series B rounds in 2022, according to TechCrunch. Its most recent round, a ₹29 crore raise from existing investor Unitary Fund in September 2026, valued the company at about ₹3,155 crore (roughly $329 million), a 23% increase on its prior round, per Entrackr and CXO Digital Pulse.
Is Jar profitable?
Jar’s net loss narrowed to ₹50.5 crore in FY25 from ₹104 crore in FY24, and the company says it turned profitable after tax in the fourth quarter of FY25 and stayed profitable in the first quarter of FY26, per TechCrunch and Inc42. Those quarterly profit figures have not been independently disclosed in detail.
Why is Jar’s FY25 revenue reported as ₹2,447.8 crore in some places and ₹208 crore in others?
Because Jar changed its accounting during FY25 to become the principal seller of the gold it offers users, rather than a pass-through intermediary. That change means the full value of gold bought and resold, ₹2,447.8 crore, now appears as total revenue, while ₹208 crore is the narrower operating-revenue figure that better reflects what Jar itself earns.
Is Jar’s digital gold regulated by the RBI or SEBI?
No. Both regulators have stated that digital gold products fall outside their regulatory perimeter; SEBI issued a public warning to this effect on 8 November 2025. Separately, Karnataka police have filed a case arguing that Jar’s specific model should instead be treated as an unregulated deposit scheme under the Banning of Unregulated Deposit Schemes Act, 2019, a case the Karnataka High Court declined to quash on 14 March 2026.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- TechCrunch, “Indian fintech Jar turns profitable by helping millions save in gold,” September 2025
- TechCrunch, “Gold investment app Jar tops $200M valuation in Tiger-led funding,” February 2022
- TechCrunch, “Tiger Global backs India savings app Jar in $22.6 million funding,” August 2022
- Inc42, “Tiger Global Leads Jar’s $22.6 Mn Funding Round, Valuation Jumps To $300 Mn,” August 2022
- Inc42, “Tiger Global-Backed Jar Spent INR 16 To Earn INR 1 In FY23,” November 2023
- Entrackr, “Jar spent Rs 137 Cr to earn Rs 9 Cr in FY23,” November 2023
- Inc42, “Jar Cuts FY24 Loss To INR 104 Cr,” December 2024
- Entrackr, “Jar’s revenue soars by 5.6X in FY24, marketing cost dips 57%,” December 2024
- Inc42, “Wealthtech Startup Jar Halves FY25 Loss To INR 50.5 Cr,” November 2025
- Business Standard, “Savings app Jar posts ninefold revenue jump, reaches profitability,” September 2025
- Inc42, “Jar’s $50 Mn Funding Deal Falls Through Over Valuation Differences,” April 2025
- Entrackr, “Jar in talks to raise $100 Mn led by Westbridge,” December 2025
- Entrackr, “Exclusive: Jar raises small fresh funding from Unitary Fund,” September 2026
- CXO Digital Pulse, “Jar Raises Rs 29 Crore From Existing Investor Unitary Fund at 23% Higher Valuation,” September 2026
- Inc42, “Wealthtech Startup Jar Marks Ecommerce Foray With Its D2C Jewellery Brand Nek,” 2024
- Entrackr, “Daily gold savings app Jar raises $4.5 Mn from Arkam Ventures, Tribe Capital and others,” September 2021
- Forbes India, “Jar: How to build your own pot of gold,” May 2024
- LiveLaw, “Digital Gold Platform Cannot Escape Law Merely By ‘Cosmetic Garb’ Of Transactions: Karnataka High Court Refuses To Quash FIR Against JAR App,” March 2026
- Moneycontrol (via TradingView), “Why digital gold savings startup Jar is under Karnataka police scanner,” February 2026
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