Startup Deep Dive : MyShubhLife — raised $29 million, sold for a fifth of it

MyShubhLife raised roughly ₹215 crore ($22.4 million, at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) across six funding rounds between 2017 and 2023, built its own Reserve Bank of India-licensed NBFC, and wired small-ticket credit into the checkout screens of PhonePe, Meesho, BharatPe and Flipkart. In May 2024, the board of UGRO Capital valued the whole business at an enterprise value of ₹45 crore — a fifth of what its backers had put in — and folded it in as a subsidiary.

That gap between money raised and price paid is the spine of this piece. MyShubhLife (built by Datasigns Technologies, and known in its early years as Shubh Loans) spent close to a decade trying to prove that a technology layer, not a balance sheet, could underwrite credit for India’s “next half billion”. It got the technology working. It never quite got the economics to hold, and its revenue nearly disappeared in the year it was absorbed. What happened in between is a fairly precise case study in how embedded finance actually makes money, and how it stops.

Quick facts

What they do

MyShubhLife is an embedded-finance platform: instead of pulling customers to its own app, it plugs small loans, insurance and savings products into apps people already use to pay, shop or take payments — PhonePe, Meesho, BharatPe, Flipkart, Mobikwik, Airtel Payment Bank, FINO Payments Bank, Spice Money and Pine Labs among its named partner platforms (company blog, September 2025). Its own Android app, sold in six Indian languages, offers mini and micro personal loans, salary advances (earned-wage access), merchant and MSME working-capital loans, insurance, mutual fund SIPs and a tax-filing service. Underwriting runs on a proprietary data-science model that scores borrowers who do not show up cleanly in a traditional credit bureau file, funded through its own RBI-licensed NBFC (Datasigns Technologies) and co-lending tie-ups with banks and larger NBFCs.

The origin

Monish Anand and Rahul Sekar registered Datasigns Technologies in Bengaluru on 9 March 2016. The insight they built the company around, as MyShubhLife states on its own site, was a credit gap in the middle of the income pyramid: households earning between roughly ₹1.4 lakh and ₹4.5 lakh a year made up about 45% of the population but accounted for only around 8% of formal credit (company-stated, MyShubhLife “Our Story”). That is not the bottom-of-the-pyramid population most microfinance targets, and it is not the salaried, bureau-scored population banks already serve. It is the gap in between — gig workers, small shopkeepers, first-time earners — who had smartphones and digital payment trails but no file a bank would lend against. Anand, an Ashoka Fellow, framed the company’s mission as building “India’s first credit scoring company” for that segment, with an early public target of bringing ten million people under a formal credit umbrella by 2022.

The struggle years

The gap between a lending idea and a lending licence took three years to close. Datasigns Technologies did not receive its NBFC licence from the Reserve Bank of India until 2019, meaning the company spent its first three years as a technology and sourcing layer sitting on top of other lenders’ balance sheets — a structurally weaker position, since it carried underwriting risk and reputational exposure without full control of the capital or the regulatory relationship. It raised a seed round in 2017 and reportedly a further seed round in August 2018 (about ₹31.87 crore, or $4.2 million) before that licence came through, running on outside capital while the core piece of its business model was still missing.

The next shock arrived from outside the company entirely. Unsecured, small-ticket lending to informal-income borrowers — exactly MyShubhLife’s book — was among the hardest-hit categories when Covid-19 lockdowns cut off cash income for gig workers and small merchants in 2020 and 2021. When the company went out to raise its Series B from Gojo & Company in 2022, its founders described the round as “a testimony to our business model and our resilience” through that period (Gojo & Company, 2 May 2022) — language that only makes sense against a genuinely difficult stretch of collections and provisioning behind it.

A third, quieter struggle: MyShubhLife’s revenue swung sharply even after it stabilised post-Covid. It reported ₹10.1 crore in FY23, up 50.4% year-on-year (Inc42 analysis of company filings) — respectable growth, but on a small base, for a company that had by then raised more than $20 million.

The turning point

The turning point was not a product launch. It was a takeover. On 2 May 2024, UGRO Capital Limited — a listed, Mumbai-headquartered NBFC focused on small-business lending — told the stock exchanges its board had approved acquiring MyShubhLife outright, making it a wholly owned subsidiary (Crunchbase; CB Insights; YourStory, May 2024). The deal valued the business at an enterprise value of ₹45 crore, structured roughly 64% cash and 36% stock (YourStory, 2 May 2024). Set against the ₹215 crore-plus MyShubhLife had raised from investors since 2017 (Inc42, April 2022, on funds raised to that point, plus the further ₹100 crore Series B), the arithmetic is blunt: a business that had taken in more than $20 million of venture and impact capital changed hands for a fraction of that in equity value.

The deal itself then took time to close. UGRO Capital said it had signed definitive agreements to acquire the MyShubhLife stake in a stock-exchange filing dated 2 January 2025 (Angel One, 2 January 2025) — eight months after the initial board approval — with completion still conditional at that point. UGRO’s own rationale was distribution and yield: MyShubhLife’s direct reach into small retailers and its embedded-lending technology stack were expected to sharpen “the granularity and yields” of UGRO’s loan portfolio, and UGRO said it planned to onboard 200,000 additional retailers over the following three years by plugging MyShubhLife’s rails into its own lending book (UGRO Capital / IBS Intelligence, May 2024).

The money behind it

MyShubhLife raised a reported $29 million (roughly ₹215 crore-plus at rates prevailing over the fundraising period) across six rounds between 2017 and 2023, from 16 named and unnamed investors, before being absorbed into UGRO Capital (Tracxn; Crunchbase).

• Seed, 2017–2018: early seed capital, including a round of about ₹31.87 crore ($4.2 million) in August 2018 (Tracxn; Inc42).
• Series A, October 2019: about ₹36.42 crore ($4.8 million), led by Omidyar Network India, with Saama Capital, BEENEXT, SRI Capital and Pravega Ventures also participating (Inc42, April 2022). Omidyar’s entry brought an impact-investing mandate specifically built around financial inclusion for underserved borrowers, matching MyShubhLife’s target segment.
• Series A extension, February 2021: about $5.5 million led by Patamar Capital, a fund focused on South and Southeast Asian inclusion-finance bets (Tracxn).
• Series B, April–May 2022: $13.18 million (₹100 crore) from Gojo & Company, a Japan-based holding company for financial-inclusion businesses across Asia; MyShubhLife was Gojo’s first digital-lending investment and its ninth group partner overall (Gojo & Company, 2 May 2022; Inc42, April 2022). The capital was earmarked to grow disbursements through co-lending partners and expand corporate and large-platform tie-ups.
• Series B extension, July 2023: a further close with participation from ten investors, taking cumulative funding to roughly $29 million (Tracxn).
• Acquisition, May 2024: UGRO Capital’s board approved buying 100% of MyShubhLife at an enterprise value of ₹45 crore, 64% cash and 36% UGRO stock, with definitive agreements following in January 2025 (YourStory; Crunchbase; Angel One).

No independent post-money valuation for MyShubhLife was publicly disclosed after the 2023 round (Tracxn, as of August 2023), which makes the ₹45 crore take-out price the only market-set number available for what the business was actually worth at the end.

How it makes money

MyShubhLife’s model runs in two linked layers: distribution and balance sheet.

• Money in: interest and fees on personal, salary-advance and merchant/MSME loans originated either on Datasigns Technologies’ own NBFC book or co-lent alongside bank and NBFC partners; smaller fee income from insurance, SIP and tax-filing add-ons cross-sold on the same app.
• Distribution: rather than spending on customer acquisition directly, MyShubhLife embeds its loan and credit-score products inside partner apps — payment, e-commerce and merchant platforms such as PhonePe, Meesho, BharatPe, Flipkart, Mobikwik, Airtel Payment Bank, FINO Payments Bank, Spice Money and Pine Labs — reaching users at the moment they already need working capital or cash (MyShubhLife company blog, September 2025).
• Underwriting edge: a proprietary, alternative-data credit-scoring model is used to price and approve borrowers who lack a conventional bureau history, which the company says is central to reaching the “Next Half Billion” segment it targets (Gojo & Company, May 2022).
• Costs out: cost of funds for the lending book, provisioning for delinquency in an unsecured, informal-income borrower base, and the technology and data-science team needed to keep underwriting models current — a cost base that does not shrink even when disbursement volumes do.
• Where the margin sits: in the spread between the cost of funds and the interest/fee income on loans, net of credit losses — the part that “people get wrong” is treating embedded finance as a pure technology or distribution margin; in practice, for a lender with its own NBFC book, the credit cycle (who defaults, and when) determines profitability far more than the distribution deal does.

The numbers

Public disclosures on profit and loss are thin — Datasigns Technologies is privately held and did not publish an IPO prospectus — but revenue can be tracked across three fiscal years from company-filing analyses.

Source: Inc42’s analysis of company filings for revenue and YoY change in each year; TheCompanyCheck’s review of the FY25 filing independently confirms both the ₹4.22 crore FY25 revenue figure and the roughly 83% year-on-year decline, which is the one figure in this table corroborated by two separate trackers. Exact net profit/loss for FY23 and FY24 was not available in the sources checked for this piece and is not stated here; FY25 EBITDA is an analyst estimate, not a company-reported figure, and is presented as such.

The shape of that table is the story: revenue roughly two-and-a-half times over in FY24, then collapsed by more than four-fifths in FY25 — the same fiscal year in which UGRO Capital’s acquisition was working its way from board approval to definitive agreement. Whether the collapse was cause or consequence of the deal terms is not disclosed in any source reviewed for this piece.

Where the money comes from

MyShubhLife does not publish a revenue split by product or geography. What is documented is a channel split — the company earns by riding on other platforms’ user bases rather than building its own:

• Payments-app rails: PhonePe and Mobikwik, both large UPI/wallet apps, used as distribution points for credit offers.
• E-commerce and social-commerce rails: Meesho and Flipkart, reaching sellers and buyers who need working capital or purchase financing.
• Merchant and neo-banking rails: BharatPe, Spice Money and Pine Labs, aimed squarely at small shopkeepers and kirana merchants.
• Banking-correspondent rails: FINO Payments Bank and Airtel Payment Bank, extending reach into semi-urban and rural customers those networks already serve.
• Direct app: MyShubhLife’s own Android app, offered in six Indian languages, bundling loans with insurance, SIPs and tax filing for cross-sell.

(MyShubhLife company blog, September 2025.) The surprise, given the “embedded finance” framing, is how much of the underlying credit risk still sits on MyShubhLife’s own NBFC balance sheet and its co-lending partners’ books rather than being fully passed through to the distribution partners — the partner apps supply the customer, but MyShubhLife and its funding partners still carry the loan.

The risks

• Distribution concentration: the business model depends on a short list of large partner platforms (PhonePe, Meesho, BharatPe, Flipkart, Mobikwik and others) continuing to embed MyShubhLife’s credit products; the loss or renegotiation of even one or two of these deals would remove a direct customer-acquisition channel with no independently built alternative of comparable scale.
• Credit-cycle exposure on an informal-income book: the target borrower base — gig workers, small merchants, first-time earners — is precisely the segment most exposed to income shocks, as the Covid-era stress the founders referenced (Gojo & Company, May 2022) already demonstrated once; a repeat shock would hit collections on an unsecured book with limited recourse.
• Revenue volatility around the ownership change: FY25 revenue fell to ₹4.22 crore from ₹25.4 crore a year earlier (Inc42; TheCompanyCheck) during the same window the UGRO Capital acquisition moved from board approval to signed agreements — a scale of swing that, whatever its cause, leaves the business’s standalone earnings power difficult to assess independently of its new parent.

The takeaway

MyShubhLife’s clearest lesson is about the ceiling on distribution-led lending. Getting embedded into PhonePe, Flipkart, BharatPe and half a dozen other large platforms proves that the technology and the partnerships can be built. It does not, by itself, prove that the credit is good or that the margin survives a hard cycle. A company can raise real money from serious, mission-aligned investors — Omidyar Network, Gojo, Patamar Capital — solve a genuine access-to-credit problem for a well-defined underserved segment, and still end up worth a fraction of what was put in, because in lending the balance sheet and the credit book eventually matter more than the app or the API. Embedded finance can lower the cost of finding a customer. It has never lowered the cost of being wrong about whether that customer pays you back.

Frequently asked questions

What is MyShubhLife?

MyShubhLife is an Indian embedded-finance platform, run by Datasigns Technologies Private Limited, that offers personal loans, merchant/MSME credit, earned-wage access, insurance and savings products, largely by embedding them inside partner apps such as PhonePe, Meesho, BharatPe and Flipkart.

Who founded MyShubhLife, and when?

Monish Anand and Rahul Sekar founded the company (registered as Datasigns Technologies) on 9 March 2016 in Bengaluru; it originally traded under the consumer brand Shubh Loans.

How much funding did MyShubhLife raise?

Around $29 million (roughly ₹215 crore-plus) across six rounds between 2017 and 2023, from investors including Omidyar Network India, Patamar Capital, Gojo & Company, BEENEXT, Pravega Ventures and Saama Capital (Tracxn; Crunchbase).

Is MyShubhLife still an independent company?

No. UGRO Capital Limited’s board approved acquiring 100% of MyShubhLife in May 2024 at an enterprise value of ₹45 crore, signed definitive agreements in January 2025, and MyShubhLife now operates as a wholly owned subsidiary of the listed NBFC.

Is MyShubhLife profitable?

No public source reviewed for this piece shows the company as profitable. Its FY25 revenue fell to ₹4.22 crore, down about 83% year-on-year, with an estimated EBITDA loss of roughly ₹31 crore for the year (Inc42; TheCompanyCheck).

Sources

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

• Inc42, “MyShubhLife Raises $13.18 Mn In Series B Funding From Gojo To Grow Its NBFC Book”, April 2022.
• Inc42, MyShubhLife company financials analysis (revenue and YoY figures, FY23–FY25), accessed September 2026.
• Gojo & Company, “Gojo announces investment in MyShubhLife, a digital lending and savings platform focusing on the Next Half Billion in India”, 2 May 2022.
• YourStory, “UGRO Capital buys MyShubhLife in a Rs 45 Cr cash-stock deal”, 2 May 2024.
• Crunchbase, “U Gro Capital acquires MyShubhLife” acquisition record, dated 2 May 2024.
• CB Insights, MyShubhLife / Datasigns company and financials profile, accessed September 2026.
• Angel One, “UGRO Capital Signs Agreement to Acquire Myshubh Life”, 2 January 2025.
• Tracxn, MyShubhLife company profile (funding rounds, investors, employee count, valuation status), accessed September 2026.
• TheCompanyCheck, Datasigns Technologies Private Limited company and financial profile (FY25 revenue, incorporation, directors, EPFO headcount), accessed September 2026.
• MyShubhLife company blog, “9 years of MyShubhLife’s Journey: Pioneering Embedded Finance in the New-Age Lending Ecosystem”, September 2025.
• MyShubhLife, “Our Story” (company website), accessed September 2026.

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