In December 2024, MobiKwik finally listed on the stock exchanges after three failed attempts spread across as many years. The valuation investors settled on, about $250 million, was less than a third of the $924 million the same company was worth in a private funding round just three years earlier.
That gap is the whole story. MobiKwik was one of India’s first mobile wallets, built for a country that barely trusted online payments in 2009. It survived demonetisation, a data breach that made national headlines, a rejected banking licence, and a business model that a government-built rival made almost obsolete overnight. It did not die. It just came back smaller, leaner on ambition, and betting on lending instead of wallets to keep the lights on.
Quick facts
| Company | One MobiKwik Systems Limited |
| Founded | April 2009, New Delhi |
| Founder(s) | Bipin Preet Singh and Upasana Taku |
| Businesses | Digital wallet and payments, payment gateway (Zaakpay), buy-now-pay-later (Zip), peer-to-peer lending platform (Xtra) |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹1,119 crore (FY26, year to March 2026) |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Net loss of ₹62 crore (FY26) |
| Listed | 18 December 2024, NSE and BSE |
| Market value / last valuation | About ₹1,673 crore (roughly $174 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0, 18 September 2026); IPO valuation was about $250 million in December 2024 |
| Key shareholders or CEO | Bipin Preet Singh (CEO); Sequoia Capital India and Bajaj Finance are among the largest institutional shareholders |
What they do
MobiKwik sells a mobile-first way to move and borrow money to two very different customers at once. For consumers, it is a digital wallet and app that handles UPI payments, mobile recharges, bill payments, and increasingly, short-term credit through its Zip buy-now-pay-later product and personal loans sourced from partner lenders. For merchants, it is a payment gateway called Zaakpay that lets an online or offline business accept cards, UPI, and wallet payments through a single integration. The company describes itself in its own investor materials as a “digital banking” platform, a rebrand from its original identity as just a wallet, and that shift in self-description is not cosmetic. It reflects where the money is actually made now.
The origin
Bipin Preet Singh, an IIT Delhi graduate who had worked on chip design at Intel and Nvidia, and Upasana Taku, an NIT Jalandhar engineer with a Stanford master’s degree and product experience at PayPal and HSBC, met through a mutual contact. The two, who later married, founded MobiKwik in April 2009 out of a small apartment in Dwarka, Delhi, bootstrapped with roughly $250,000 of Singh’s own savings. The founding insight was narrow and practical rather than visionary: mobile phone penetration in India was rising fast, but paying for a prepaid recharge or a utility bill online was still clumsy and largely cash-dependent. A closed-loop wallet that made recharges and bill payments a few taps away was the wedge product; everything else, from merchant payments to lending, was added over the following decade.
The struggle years
MobiKwik’s history includes several moments that could plausibly have ended it. In May 2020, the app was briefly pulled from the Google Play Store over an advertisement policy violation, an embarrassing but survivable stumble. Far more serious was March 2021, when a security researcher alleged that KYC data belonging to roughly 3.5 million to 11 crore users, including Aadhaar and PAN details, was for sale on the dark web. MobiKwik initially denied any breach had occurred and said it would pursue legal action against the researchers, a response that drew criticism for its tone; the Reserve Bank of India subsequently ordered a forensic security audit of the company’s systems. The company had also filed for an IPO in 2021 seeking about ₹1,900 crore, only to shelve those plans after Paytm’s disastrous 2021 listing spooked the market for Indian fintech stocks. In 2022, the RBI rejected MobiKwik’s application for a payment aggregator licence outright, reportedly over concerns linked to its processing of payments for cryptocurrency exchanges through Zaakpay; the company had to reapply and, as of its 2024 prospectus, held only an in-principle approval with final sign-off still pending. Each of these episodes chipped away at the story MobiKwik could tell prospective public-market investors.
The turning point
The event that actually reshaped MobiKwik was not a single dramatic day but a quiet pivot forced by a structural threat: the rise of the Unified Payments Interface. UPI’s free, interoperable, bank-to-bank rails made a closed-loop wallet largely redundant for peer-to-peer and merchant payments, and MobiKwik’s own disclosures capture the resulting shift starkly. In its 2021 IPO prospectus, payment services made up around 79% of operating revenue. By the time of its 2024 prospectus, covering FY23, that share had fallen to about 45%, with financial services, chiefly the Zip credit line and personal loan distribution, making up more than half of revenue instead. The scale of the pivot shows up even more clearly in lending volumes: MobiKwik’s own disclosed lending gross merchandise value grew from about ₹300 crore in FY21 to roughly ₹5,115 crore in FY23, a jump of more than 17 times in two years. A wallet company had, in effect, turned itself into a lending distributor to survive, and it worked well enough to get the company to profitability in FY24, before a new regulatory shock (covered below) showed how fragile that fix was.
The money behind it
MobiKwik has raised roughly $270 million to $285 million in equity across more than 20 rounds since 2009, according to funding trackers and the company’s own disclosures, before its IPO added a further ₹572 crore. Three backers shaped the company’s direction in different ways. Sequoia Capital India came in during the early growth rounds and stayed on as the largest single institutional shareholder, holding a stake reported at around 17% ahead of listing. Bajaj Finance, one of India’s largest non-bank lenders, bought roughly an 11% stake for ₹225 crore in 2017, a deal that mattered less for the capital than for what it signalled: a large, established lender was willing to plug into MobiKwik’s user base for credit distribution, a relationship that underpins much of today’s Zip and personal-loan business. The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority bought a smaller stake in 2021 for about $20 million, a deal that pushed MobiKwik’s private valuation toward $700 million and, months later, past $1 billion on a secondary sale of employee shares, at a time when the company was still hoping to list at $1.5 billion to $1.7 billion. None of that valuation survived contact with public markets in 2024, when the IPO priced the company at around $250 million, a decline of about 73% from its 2021 peak, according to TechCrunch’s analysis of the offer documents, a figure corroborated by Inc42’s comparison of the 2021 and 2024 prospectuses, which put the company’s own unlisted share price at roughly ₹1,400 in October 2021 falling to as low as ₹350 before recovering to about ₹725 ahead of the 2024 filing.
How it makes money
MobiKwik earns money in two structurally different ways, and the difference matters more than the marketing suggests. On the payments side, it takes a small commission on recharges and bill payments, and a per-transaction fee from merchants using Zaakpay, its payment gateway. These fees are thin because UPI, which now carries the bulk of digital payment volume in India, is effectively free for peer-to-peer transfers and carries very low merchant charges, so MobiKwik largely competes on volume rather than margin here. On the financial services side, it earns processing fees and a share of interest income for originating and servicing Zip’s buy-now-pay-later credit lines and personal loans, which are actually lent by partner non-bank lenders and banks, plus platform fees from Xtra, its peer-to-peer lending marketplace where retail depositors lend to borrowers vetted by a partner NBFC. The margin sits almost entirely in this second bucket: lending distribution and servicing fees carry a far higher take rate than payment commissions. The part most outside observers get wrong is treating MobiKwik as a “wallet company” akin to Paytm’s early identity; by FY23 it was already, by revenue mix, more of a lending distributor that happened to have a payments app as its customer-acquisition channel. Costs run the other way: payment gateway and banking charges, provisioning against loan defaults, customer acquisition spend and cashback, and the cost of running lending operations at scale, which is why a slowdown in the lending book, discussed below, hits profitability disproportionately hard.
The numbers
MobiKwik’s revenue has grown almost every year since FY22, but profitability has swung sharply, turning on how well the lending business is doing in any given period. The table below uses consolidated figures compiled from the company’s exchange filings.
| Fiscal year | Revenue (₹ crore) | Net profit / (loss) (₹ crore) |
| FY23 (year to March 2023) | 539 | (84) |
| FY24 (year to March 2024) | 875 | 14 |
| FY25 (year to March 2025) | 1,170 | (122) |
| FY26 (year to March 2026) | 1,119 | (62) |
FY24 was MobiKwik’s first profitable year on record, helped by the lending pivot described above. FY25 reversed that: revenue from operations still grew, up 33.9% year on year to about ₹1,192 crore on one measure reported by Business Standard, but total expenses rose 49% to ₹1,271.88 crore, driven largely by payment gateway costs, which alone accounted for 45.3% of total spending in the March 2025 quarter, pushing the company back into a loss of roughly ₹121.5 crore to ₹122 crore. FY26 losses narrowed to about ₹62 crore, with the company reporting its third consecutive profitable quarter by the June 2026 quarter, when it posted a net profit of about ₹7.6 crore to ₹8 crore against a loss of ₹41.9 crore in the same quarter a year earlier.
Where the money comes from
MobiKwik does not disclose a geographic split because it operates almost entirely within India; the more useful lens is the split between its two business lines, and here the surprise is that the story has flipped twice in three years. Through FY23, financial services, chiefly Zip and personal loans, had grown to over half of revenue and was widely credited with rescuing the company from wallet-era decline. Then, in the April to June 2025 quarter, financial services revenue collapsed 65% year on year to about ₹58.3 crore from ₹170.7 crore, while payments revenue grew to about ₹213 crore from ₹171.54 crore over the same period, according to the company’s Q1 FY26 results as reported by Medianama and Business Standard. In other words, the “old”, supposedly declining payments business became the majority revenue driver again, not because it suddenly got stronger, but because the lending business that had replaced it was pulled back sharply by a regulatory change, covered next. Payments GMV kept climbing regardless, reaching what the company called an all-time high of about ₹58,700 crore in the June 2026 quarter, up roughly 50% year on year, showing that user and merchant activity was not the problem; the mix of what MobiKwik was allowed to monetise was.
The risks
Three risks sit close to the surface of MobiKwik’s business, and two of them have already shown up in its financial statements rather than staying hypothetical. First, MobiKwik’s payment aggregator licence, rejected by the RBI in 2021 and reapplied for since, still carried only an in-principle approval as of its 2024 prospectus, with final sign-off pending; the company itself has stated it “may or may not” receive final approval, and a negative outcome could force changes to how Zaakpay processes merchant payments. Second, its peer-to-peer lending product, Xtra, runs on a partner NBFC’s licence, not its own, which means it inherits that segment’s regulatory risk directly. When the RBI issued revised P2P lending master directions in August 2024, capping individual investment at ₹50 lakh per platform and ₹50,000 per borrower and banning assured-return and instant-liquidity features, MobiKwik’s partner had to suspend “anytime withdrawals” on Xtra within weeks, a change that drew user complaints and fed directly into the 65% year-on-year collapse in financial services revenue described above. Third, the company’s 2024 prospectus disclosed more than ₹250 crore in pending litigation across criminal cases and tax proceedings, along with dozens of consumer disputes, an overhang that could translate into cash outflows or reputational damage at a company that only recently returned to profitability.
The takeaway
MobiKwik’s history is a case study in what it costs to survive a platform shift you did not cause. When UPI made the original wallet business commercially thin, the company did not fold; it re-engineered its revenue model around lending distribution, and that decision is the only reason it reached profitability at all in FY24. But that fix simply moved the company’s central risk from “will people keep using our wallet” to “will our lending partner’s regulator change the rules this quarter”, and the August 2024 P2P directions show that swap was not free. The transferable lesson is not that pivoting works; it is that a pivot which trades one concentrated risk for another concentrated risk buys time, not safety, and the next shock tends to arrive from exactly the direction the last rescue came from.
Frequently asked questions
When did MobiKwik go public, and at what valuation?
MobiKwik listed on the NSE and BSE on 18 December 2024, after raising ₹572 crore in its IPO at a valuation of about $250 million, roughly 73% below the $924 million valuation it had commanded in a 2021 private funding round, as reported by TechCrunch and corroborated by Inc42’s review of the company’s 2021 and 2024 prospectuses.
Is MobiKwik profitable?
It has been inconsistent. MobiKwik posted its first annual profit, about ₹14 crore, in FY24, then swung to a loss of roughly ₹121.5 crore to ₹122 crore in FY25 as costs rose faster than revenue. FY26 losses narrowed to about ₹62 crore, and the company reported a net profit of roughly ₹7.6 crore to ₹8 crore in the quarter to June 2026, its third straight profitable quarter on that measure.
What is MobiKwik Zip?
Zip is MobiKwik’s buy-now-pay-later product, offering short-term, typically interest-free credit lines for online and offline purchases, with reported credit limits between ₹1,000 and ₹60,000. It is distributed by MobiKwik but funded by partner non-bank lenders and banks, and it became a major driver of the company’s financial services revenue after 2021.
Why did the RBI’s 2024 peer-to-peer lending rules hurt MobiKwik?
MobiKwik’s Xtra product let retail users lend money to borrowers through a partner NBFC under India’s peer-to-peer lending framework. The RBI’s revised master directions in August 2024 banned assured minimum returns and instant-liquidity features and capped investment amounts, forcing MobiKwik’s partner to suspend on-demand withdrawals. Financial services revenue fell 65% year on year in the quarter to June 2025 as a direct result.
Who are MobiKwik’s biggest shareholders?
Co-founder and CEO Bipin Preet Singh and co-founder Upasana Taku remain significant shareholders. Among institutional investors, Sequoia Capital India has been the largest backer since an early funding round, and Bajaj Finance, which bought an 11% stake for ₹225 crore in 2017, is another major shareholder with a direct commercial link to MobiKwik’s lending business.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- TechCrunch, December 2024 — MobiKwik slashes valuation by 73% in India IPO
- Business Standard, December 2024 — One MobiKwik Systems IPO subscribed 20.37 times
- Inc42, 2024 — A tale of two DRHPs: decoding MobiKwik’s business strategy shift from 2021 to 2024
- Entrackr, August 2024 — MobiKwik posts Rs 875 Cr revenue and Rs 14 Cr profit in FY24
- Entrackr, September 2024 — MobiKwik Xtra suspends “anytime withdrawals”; draws flak from users
- Business Standard, May 2025 — MobiKwik revenue up 34% in FY25 but losses widen on rising costs
- Business Standard, August 2025 — One MobiKwik Q1 loss widens to Rs 42 crore as revenue falls 20.7% to Rs 271 crore
- Medianama, August 2025 — MobiKwik reports 18.5% YoY decline in Q1 FY26 income
- Moneycontrol via TradingView, 2024 — MobiKwik DRHP: tight regulations, sustained profitability, expanding financial services among factors to watch out for
- Wikipedia, accessed September 2026 — MobiKwik
- StartupTalky — MobiKwik success story: business model, founders, IPO
- Screener.in, accessed September 2026 — One MobiKwik Systems Ltd consolidated financials
- Tickertape, accessed September 2026 — One MobiKwik Systems share price, market cap and results
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