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

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The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for Lentra.

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

Company Lentra (Lentra AI Private Limited)
Founded 2018 — incorporated 30 July 2018, Pune
Founder(s) D Venkatesh and Ankur Handa; Rangarajan Vasudevan joined as co-founder in 2022
Businesses Cloud SaaS for loan origination, loan management, credit decisioning and co-lending, sold to banks and NBFCs
Latest FY revenue ₹217.4 crore (~$22.6 million) in FY25, up 18.4% year on year
Latest FY profit/loss Net loss of ₹3.0 crore in FY25
Listed Private — not listed on any exchange
Market value / last valuation Above $400 million as of the November 2022 Series B (reported)
Key shareholders or CEO Bessemer Venture Partners, SIG, Citi Ventures, HDFC Bank (about 6.6%); CEO Rajesh Kumar Rathanchand from 31 March 2026, founder D Venkatesh now managing director

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

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

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.

Fiscal year Revenue (₹ crore) Profit / (loss) (₹ crore)
FY22 71.53 (52.0)
FY24 183.6 0.82
FY25 217.4 (3.0)

Where the money comes from

The risks

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).

Found an error? Write to us and we’ll correct it in the open, dated, on the piece.

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