Startup Deep Dive : Lentra — the invisible engine behind India’s bank loan approvals

Lentra runs the loan-approval engine sitting behind more than 60 Indian banks and NBFCs, yet it has never lent a rupee of its own money or taken a single rupee of credit risk. In November 2022, Citi Ventures made its first-ever fintech investment in India by backing this Pune company, in a round that valued it above $400 million (reported) — and two years later Lentra swung from a wafer-thin FY24 profit to a fresh loss even as revenue kept growing.

That contradiction sits at the heart of what Lentra actually is: not a lender, but the plumbing that decides, in seconds, whether a bank should lend to you. It is a business built on other people’s balance sheets, selling picks and shovels to an industry that is still digitising its oldest processes.

Quick facts

What they do

Lentra sells software, not loans. Banks and non-banking finance companies license its cloud platform to run the parts of lending that used to sit on paper and spreadsheets: pulling a customer’s data from credit bureaus and bank statements, scoring them, deciding yes or no in seconds through a rules-and-AI engine called GoNoGo, then servicing and collecting on the loan through a loan management system called 1LMS. Clients named across company and press material include HDFC Bank, Federal Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, IDFC First Bank, TVS Credit Services and Tata Capital. The pitch to a bank is simple: keep the balance sheet and the regulatory licence, hand Lentra the software layer that decides who gets money and how fast.

The origin

Lentra did not start as a scrappy garage idea. It was carved out of an existing company. On 30 July 2018, Lentra AI Private Limited was incorporated to take over the software business of Softcell Technologies through a formal demerger, according to a disclosure filed by HDFC Bank, which had been a Softcell shareholder and so inherited a stake in the new entity. Ankur Handa, one of the two founders, had spent years inside that world already, running credit-risk and card-issuing technology at Softcell and, before that, at Barclaycard. D Venkatesh, the other founder, brought more than two decades in enterprise software. Their shared insight was not exotic: Indian banks had spent the smartphone decade watching Swiggy, Uber and Amazon rebuild consumer expectations around instant, digital decisions, while a loan application at most banks still meant physical paperwork, multiple branch visits and a decision measured in days. Lentra’s bet was that banks would pay well for software that closed that gap without forcing them to rebuild their core systems from scratch.

The struggle years

The company’s early years carried the ordinary strain of selling deeply technical software into an industry that changes slowly and trusts even more slowly. Two pressures stand out in the public record. First, the economics did not turn favourable quickly: Lentra’s loss more than doubled in FY22, widening to about ₹52 crore from roughly ₹24.7 crore in FY21, even as revenue grew, a sign that scaling a bank-facing platform meant spending ahead of the client base it was chasing. Second, the regulatory ground moved under the entire industry in September 2022, when the Reserve Bank of India issued its Digital Lending Guidelines, forcing every regulated entity and its technology vendors to rebuild core flows by the end of November that year: disbursals had to move directly between lender and borrower with no pooling accounts in between, standardised Key Fact Statements had to be shown before a loan was signed, and fees had to run from the regulated lender to any technology provider rather than from the borrower. For a company whose entire product sits inside that disbursal and disclosure workflow, compliance was not optional homework; it was a forced rebuild of the plumbing mid-flight, absorbed at the same time the company was trying to close its largest funding round to date.

The turning point

The inflection came in November 2022. Bessemer Venture Partners and SIG led a $60 million Series B, and Citi Ventures joined as a new investor — its first fintech bet in India — pushing Lentra’s valuation above $400 million, according to Entrackr and TechCrunch’s reporting on the round. The numbers on either side of that round tell the real story. Before it, in FY21, Lentra had booked about ₹44.72 crore in revenue and worked with roughly 40 banks. By the time the round closed, FY22 revenue had grown 60% to ₹71.53 crore, the company said it was processing over 13 billion transactions and $21 billion worth of loans across its clients, and it began opening offices in Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines. As part of the same round, HDFC Bank sold down part of its holding — 73,941 shares worth ₹54.17 crore — trimming its stake to about 6.6% on a fully diluted basis, per Inc42’s reporting on the disclosure, evidence that the round doubled as an exit ramp for an early backer even as new money came in.

The money behind it

• Series A — November 2019: about ₹77 crore (roughly $12 million), with HDFC Bank and Bessemer Venture Partners participating; HDFC Bank’s first cheque into Lentra was dated 21 November 2019 (HDFC Bank disclosure; Entrackr).
• Series B — November 2022: $60 million led by Bessemer Venture Partners and SIG, with new investor Citi Ventures joining; valuation reported above $400 million (Entrackr; Citi Ventures press release).
• Extended Series B — June 2023: a further $27 million from MUFG Bank and Dharana Capital, taking disclosed funding across the three rounds to at least $99 million (Entrackr).
• What each backer changed: HDFC Bank gave Lentra its first anchor client and credibility with other banks; Bessemer and SIG underwrote the scale-up through Series B; Citi Ventures’ entry signalled international banking credibility ahead of Lentra’s push into Southeast Asia and the US; MUFG Bank’s cheque came bundled with a banking-sector relationship in Asia.
• Shareholding note: HDFC Bank, an investor since the 2018 demerger, remains a shareholder at about 6.6% after selling part of its stake alongside the Series B (Inc42).

Some third-party trackers cite higher cumulative funding totals for Lentra, but their round-by-round breakdowns do not reconcile with the amounts publicly reported by Entrackr, TechCrunch and Citi Ventures at the time of each round, so this piece sticks to the disclosed, sourced figures above.

How it makes money

• Consumption-based licensing: banks pay Lentra based on platform usage — loan applications processed, decisions made — rather than a flat annual licence fee, so Lentra’s revenue rises and falls with the volume of loans its bank clients originate.
• Growth in that usage base: Lentra’s own disclosures to TechCrunch put its annualised revenue run-rate at about $1 million in 2019, growing to about $10 million by 2022, with a company target of $100 million by 2024 (company-stated, unconfirmed against audited results).
• Where the margin sits: because Lentra carries no loan book and no credit risk of its own, its cost base is software development, cloud infrastructure and the compliance work needed to keep pace with RBI rules — a materially lighter balance sheet than any of the lenders it serves.
• The part people get wrong: Lentra is frequently mistaken for a lender or an NBFC because its name sits next to loan decisions. It is neither; it holds no lending licence and does not disburse from its own funds. Its revenue is a technology fee, not interest income.

The numbers

Audited figures are not uniformly available for every year; the table below uses only the fiscal years for which a named source reports actual results.

• FY22: revenue ₹71.53 crore, up 60% over FY21’s ₹44.72 crore; loss widened to ₹52 crore from ₹24.7 crore (Entrackr, citing MCA filings).
• FY23: no audited figure is publicly available; the company had guided to around ₹180 crore for the year (Entrackr, June 2023) — a target, not a reported actual, so it is excluded from the table above.
• FY24: revenue ₹183.6 crore, with a thin net profit of about ₹0.82 crore (Inc42 Datalabs).
• FY25: revenue ₹217.4 crore, up 18.4% over FY24; the company swung to a net loss of ₹3.0 crore despite an estimated positive EBITDA of ₹9.8 crore (Inc42 Datalabs).

Where the money comes from

• Product lines: GoNoGo (loan origination and decisioning), 1LMS (loan management, built with a Google Cloud partnership), MultiBureau and TransferX (data and credit-bureau connectors), BREx (a no-code rules engine) and a co-lending module for bank-NBFC partnerships (company product pages).
• Lending segments served: retail lending, business/MSME lending and agricultural lending journeys, each sold as a configurable workflow rather than a single generic product (company site).
• Geographic footprint: India remains the core market; Lentra opened operations in Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines from around January 2023 and has stated ambitions in the United States, alongside an earlier Singapore presence gained through its 2022 acquisition of TheDataTeam (TechCrunch; Entrackr).
• Client base: more than 60 banks and NBFCs by mid-2023, up from over 40 as of the November 2022 funding round, including HDFC Bank, Federal Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, IDFC First Bank, TVS Credit Services and Tata Capital (Entrackr; Business Standard).
• The surprise: despite the international expansion headlines, Lentra’s revenue growth through FY25 still tracks its Indian bank relationships most closely — no source in the public record breaks out revenue by geography, so the extent of the international contribution cannot yet be verified and is not claimed here.

The risks

• Concentration in a small client set: Lentra’s own marketing repeatedly names the same handful of large banks — HDFC Bank, Federal Bank, Standard Chartered, IDFC First — as anchor clients. A B2B platform serving dozens of institutional accounts rather than millions of retail users carries concentration risk by construction: losing or materially renegotiating even one large bank relationship would move the revenue needle far more than it would for a consumer-scale app.
• Regulatory dependency: Lentra’s core product sits inside the exact workflow the RBI has repeatedly tightened — first with the September 2022 Digital Lending Guidelines and again with the 2025 Digital Lending Directions covering disbursal, disclosure and data-consent rules. Every tightening forces Lentra and its bank clients to rebuild parts of the product on a regulator’s clock, not the company’s own.
• Profitability is not yet durable: revenue climbed from ₹183.6 crore in FY24 to ₹217.4 crore in FY25, but the bottom line moved the wrong way, from a small profit to a ₹3.0 crore loss (Inc42 Datalabs). A single year of growth alongside a swing back into loss suggests the business has not yet locked in the operating leverage that consumption-based SaaS models are supposed to deliver.
• A crowded, consolidating market: Lentra competes with Nucleus Software’s FinnOne Neo, Perfios, FinBox and Finflux, the last of which M2P Fintech acquired in March 2025 for a reported $15-20 million. Consolidation among rivals can cut either way — fewer competitors, but also bigger, better-funded combined players bidding for the same bank contracts.

The takeaway

Lentra’s story is a reminder that the more interesting infrastructure bets are often invisible ones. It never had to win over a single consumer; it had to win over compliance and technology teams inside banks that move at the pace of the most cautious person in the room, and it did that by starting from an existing company’s client relationships rather than from zero. But operating inside someone else’s regulated, risk-averse industry cuts both ways: the same banking relationships that gave Lentra credibility and its first cheque also mean its growth, its compliance calendar and even its ownership table move at a pace set largely by the institutions it serves, not by the platform itself.

Frequently asked questions

What does Lentra actually sell?

Cloud software that banks and NBFCs use to originate, decide on and manage loans — including a decisioning engine (GoNoGo), a loan management system (1LMS) and data-connector tools — rather than loans themselves.

Is Lentra a lender or an NBFC?

No. Lentra holds no lending licence and takes on no credit risk; its clients, which are licensed banks and NBFCs, do the actual lending using Lentra’s software.

Who are Lentra’s biggest investors?

Bessemer Venture Partners and SIG led its Series B alongside new investor Citi Ventures in November 2022; HDFC Bank has been a shareholder since the company’s 2018 demerger from Softcell Technologies and still holds about 6.6%.

How much is Lentra worth?

Its last reported valuation was above $400 million at the time of the November 2022 Series B, per Entrackr and TechCrunch; no more recent valuation has been publicly disclosed.

Is Lentra profitable?

It is close to breakeven rather than reliably profitable: Inc42 Datalabs reports a small net profit of about ₹0.82 crore in FY24 followed by a net loss of ₹3.0 crore in FY25, even as revenue grew 18.4%.

Sources

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

• Entrackr, “Fintech SaaS startup Lentra bags $60 Mn from Bessemer, SIG and Citi Ventures”, November 2022
• Entrackr, “Fintech SaaS startup Lentra raises $27 Mn in extended Series B round”, June 2023
• TechCrunch, “Citi India investment SaaS startup Lentra funding”, November 2022
• Citi Ventures, “Investing in Lentra to Help Supercharge the Digital Lending Ecosystem in APAC”, November 2022
• Inc42, “Lentra Financials 2026 – Revenue, P&L & Cash Flow” (Inc42 Datalabs), 2026
• Inc42, “HDFC Bank Divests 3.21% Stake In Fintech SaaS Startup Lentra”, November 2022
• Business Standard, “HDFC Bank makes additional investment in Lentra”, November 2019
• HDFC Bank, stakeholder disclosure PDF naming Lentra AI Private Limited, October 2022
• Business Standard, “HDFC Bank-backed Lentra acquires AI startup TheDataTeam for undisclosed sum”, June 2022
• afaqs!, “Lentra appoints Rajesh Kumar Rathanchand as CEO”, 2026
• Business Standard, “Lentra appoints former TransUnion CIBIL chief Rajesh Rathanchand as CEO”, 2026
• Lentra, company “About us” page, accessed September 2026
• Reserve Bank of India Digital Lending Guidelines coverage, International Bar Association and Khaitan & Co legal summaries, September 2022
• Tofler / Tracxn, Lentra AI Private Limited company filings summary, accessed September 2026

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