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Startup Deep Dive : Neokred — it raised $1.2M and turned that into Rs 93 crore in revenue

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The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for Neokred.

Neokred has raised a reported $1.2 million (₹8 crore) in its entire life as a company, all of it in a single seed round that closed in September 2021 (Entrepreneur India, September 2021; Tracxn). By FY25 it was booking ₹93.2 crore (~$9.7 million) in revenue and a net profit of ₹10.4 crore (Inc42’s financial database, FY25).

That is a fintech infrastructure company that grew its top line more than five-fold in four years on less capital than a single seed cheque at most competing banking-as-a-service startups, and it did so without a second institutional round ever showing up in the public record. The company is Neokred, a Bengaluru-based embedded-finance and card-issuance platform co-founded by Tarun Nazare and Rohith Reji in 2019 — and the gap between how little it raised and how much revenue it now books is the thread this piece pulls on.

Quick facts

Company Neokred Technologies Private Limited
Founded 2019, Bengaluru
Founders Tarun Nazare (co-founder and managing director) and Rohith Reji (co-founder and CEO); Tracxn’s filing summary lists both as co-founder and co-CEO
Businesses Banking-as-a-service infrastructure: prepaid and co-branded card issuance, KYC/onboarding (ProfileX), payment collection (CollectBot), consent management (Blutic)
Latest FY revenue ₹93.2 crore (~$9.7 million), FY25 (April 2024 to March 2025)
Latest FY profit/loss Net profit of ₹10.4 crore, FY25
Listed Private — no listing or IPO filing found
Market value / last valuation Reported at ₹28.2 crore (~$3.4 million) to ₹50 crore (~$6 million), as of September 2021 — no later valuation is publicly disclosed
Key shareholders / CEO Founders together held 66.32% as of the last disclosed filing referenced by Tracxn (2021); CEO Rohith Reji

What they do

Neokred sells the plumbing, not the front end. It is a business-to-business-to-consumer infrastructure provider: banks, non-banking financial companies, fintechs, NGOs and direct-to-consumer brands plug into its stack to issue prepaid and co-branded cards, run identity verification and onboarding, collect payments, and manage user consent — without building any of that themselves. Its named enterprise relationships include Yes Bank for co-branded prepaid cards, and platforms such as RazorPay, Paytm, Coinswitch Kuber, Radiant Acemoney and Centrico Insurance Repository have been cited as clients or partners in profiles of the founders (Forbes India, 2026). The company describes its own positioning as “the digital infrastructure layer that helps modern businesses scale by streamlining profiling, payments, and privacy” (Neokred, company website).

The origin

Rohith Reji and Tarun Nazare did not set out to build a bank. They met at MSS Payments, an earlier payments startup, where Nazare — who already had six years in fintech behind him — and Reji, who had spent time at Larsen & Toubro and running TEDx events before that, started talking about what was actually broken in Indian financial services (Entrepreneur India, 2024; Forbes India, 2026). Nazare has said the spark came from a conversation with a digital banking head at a major Indian bank, who described how slow and siloed it was to ship a new financial product even inside an established institution (Entrepreneur India, 2024). Reji’s framing of the same insight was that Neokred could be “a bridge connecting the trust and infrastructure of Indian banks with the agility and innovation” of newer, faster-moving companies (Neokred, company website; Forbes India, 2026). They founded the company in Bengaluru in 2019 with a narrower first product: prepaid cards, built on a partnership with Yes Bank that the founders date to 2018-19 (Forbes India, 2026).

The struggle years

The version of Neokred that existed in its first two years is not the company that exists now. It started as what its own profile calls “a niche prepaid card provider” and only later rebuilt itself into “a full-stack Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) enabler” (Tracxn company profile, 2026) — a pivot from selling one card product to selling an entire embedded-finance stack, made without the fanfare of a renamed company or a splashy relaunch. The fundraising history tells its own quiet story of difficulty: rather than closing one seed round, Neokred raised its money in pieces — an initial tranche in June 2021, then a second, extended close of $500,000 in September 2021 from Virenxia Group, Rajesh Jain and Nitin Agarwal (Entrepreneur India, September 2021; Tracxn). No further institutional round has been reported since. That is unusual for a company that has since multiplied its revenue several times over — most infrastructure fintechs at this growth rate raise a Series A within two to three years, not run for half a decade on one extended seed.

The headcount data hints at a bumpier recent stretch too. A Technology For You profile of CEO Rohith Reji, published in January 2026, put the team at “over 140 employees.” By September 2026, Inc42’s company tracker showed headcount at 79 — a fall of roughly 45% in under a year, with no public statement explaining it (Technology For You, January 2026; Inc42 company tracker, accessed September 2026). Neither source frames this as a layoff, and Neokred has not commented publicly on the change; it is noted here as a documented discrepancy rather than a confirmed event.

The turning point

The clearest inflection point in Neokred’s public numbers is profitability, not funding. In 2023, the company said it had turned profitable, with a 5% profit margin, and was targeting 30% by 2024 (Entrepreneur India, 2024). It did not reach that target, but it did keep climbing: by FY25, Neokred’s net margin stood at 11.2%, more than double the 2023 figure, on ₹93.2 crore of revenue and ₹10.4 crore of net profit — itself up 130% year-on-year (Inc42 financial database, FY25). The company went, in other words, from a small, marginally profitable prepaid-card business to a double-digit-margin infrastructure provider inside roughly two fiscal years, without the capital injection that usually accompanies that kind of scaling.

The money behind it

How it makes money

Neokred’s revenue comes from selling infrastructure access to other businesses rather than from serving end consumers directly — the classic banking-as-a-service model. Its clients pay to plug into modules rather than build compliance-heavy financial functions in-house.

Neokred has not published a take rate or per-transaction fee schedule, and no figure for exactly how it prices access to each module is available in the public record — that detail is cut here rather than estimated.

The numbers

Neokred’s standalone financials are only reliably available for the two most recent fiscal years in the aggregator data reviewed for this piece; an unreconciled, much smaller figure appears in one older database entry for an earlier period, and rather than present numbers that cannot be checked against each other, that entry is left out below.

Metric (₹ crore) FY24 FY25
Revenue 41.6 93.2
Total expenses not separately disclosed 77.3
Net profit (PAT) 4.5 (implied by FY25’s reported 130% YoY growth) 10.4
Net margin ~10.8% 11.2%

Source: Inc42’s company financial database, which draws on regulatory filings; figures as tracked in September 2026. The FY24 profit figure is back-calculated from Inc42’s stated 130% year-on-year PAT growth to FY25 and is presented as implied, not separately confirmed.

Where the money comes from

The risks

The takeaway

The lesson in Neokred’s numbers is not that bootstrapping beats venture capital — plenty of infrastructure startups need the capital to build compliance, security and bank integrations before they can earn a rupee. It is that revenue can be a substitute for a fundraising narrative, if a company is patient enough to let it work. Neokred spent its first two years failing to be an interesting card company, then a few more years quietly turning into an unglamorous, profitable plumbing business for other people’s financial products. Nobody was writing about the milestone rounds, because there mostly weren’t any after 2021. What kept the business alive was every quarter’s client renewals compounding into a top line that eventually justified itself. For founders outside the metros’ venture spotlight, that is a slower but more durable model than the one usually celebrated in Indian fintech coverage.

Frequently asked questions

What does Neokred actually sell?

Banking-as-a-service infrastructure: prepaid and co-branded card issuance, KYC and onboarding through its ProfileX product, payment collection through CollectBot, and data-consent management through Blutic, sold to banks, NBFCs, fintechs, NGOs and D2C brands rather than to individual consumers.

Who founded Neokred and when?

Tarun Nazare and Rohith Reji founded Neokred in Bengaluru in 2019, after meeting at an earlier payments startup, MSS Payments.

How much funding has Neokred raised, and from whom?

A reported $1.2 million (~₹8 crore) in total, entirely at seed stage, closed in stages through September 2021, with backers including Virenxia Group, Rajesh Jain and Nitin Agarwal. No later round has been publicly disclosed.

Is Neokred profitable?

Yes, on the numbers available. It reported a 5% profit margin in 2023 and a net profit of ₹10.4 crore on ₹93.2 crore of revenue in FY25 — an 11.2% net margin, per Inc42’s financial database.

What is Neokred’s current valuation?

The only publicly reported figures date to September 2021 and disagree with each other: ₹28.2 crore (~$3.4 million) per Preqin, and ₹50 crore (~$6 million) per Tracxn. No valuation from a more recent round is publicly available.

Sources

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

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