Startup Deep Dive : Niyo — the neobank with no banking licence that survived a 2023 RBI freeze

Niyo has never held a banking licence. Yet by FY25 more than six million Indians were using its cards to spend abroad, built entirely on rails borrowed from two small partner banks — a dependence that nearly broke the business in January 2023, when a single regulatory order froze international transactions overnight.

The company survived that freeze, and went on to cut a net loss that once ran past ₹140 crore down to ₹77.8 crore on revenue of ₹123.4 crore (~$12.9 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) in FY25, as per financial statements reported by Inc42 in October 2025. It is a decade-old story of a payroll-benefits startup that had to reinvent itself twice — once when a Union Budget change killed its first product, and once when its own banking partner became the risk — before “zero forex markup” became a household phrase among Indian travellers.

Quick facts

What they do

Niyo sells digital banking products to two very different Indian customers through the same technology stack. To outbound travellers, students going abroad and freelancers billing overseas clients, it sells the Niyo Global card: a prepaid, multi-currency card issued with partner banks DCB Bank and SBM Bank India that lets users load rupees and spend in more than 130 currencies across 180-plus countries without the 2-3% markup that regular debit and credit cards charge on foreign spending. To blue-collar and lower-income salaried workers who traditional banks have historically found unprofitable to serve, it sells Niyo Bharat: zero-balance salary accounts issued with DCB Bank, YES Bank and ICICI Bank, aimed at employers who need to disburse wages digitally. A third, newer line, Niyo Forex, lets customers buy and sell physical foreign currency at live rates through its own RBI-licensed forex arm, Kanji Forex Pvt Ltd.

The origin

Vinay Bagri spent 18 years in banking, at ICICI Bank, Standard Chartered, ING and Kotak Mahindra Bank, before co-founding Niyo with Virender Bisht, a former MakeMyTrip and TCS technologist, in 2015. Their first insight was not about travel at all. As Bagri told Analytics Steps in an interview published in April 2021, “the government provides around 20 tax sops to every salaried employee” that most companies never structure into a pay slip, so Niyo’s first product restructured salary components to legally raise an employee’s take-home pay, by Bagri’s own account, by ₹50,000 to ₹70,000 a year, without changing the employer’s cost, as reported by The News Minute in 2018.

That single idea, that most of the friction in Indian salaried life is a plumbing problem banks had no incentive to fix, is the thread that runs through everything Niyo has built since: tax-efficient pay structuring, then zero-balance accounts for workers banks would not serve, then a forex card that removed a fee nobody had bothered to make transparent.

The struggle years

Niyo’s first business nearly disappeared within two years of launch, and its second nearly did the same six years later.

• 2018-19: the tax-benefits product loses its reason to exist. Niyo’s original payroll product depended on employees claiming separate tax exemptions for components like medical reimbursement and conveyance allowance. The Union Budget 2018-19, presented in February 2018, replaced those exemptions with a flat ₹40,000 standard deduction, sharply narrowing the saving Niyo’s product could offer. Company executives have said the tax-benefits line was “growing real fast” until the budget change, after which they judged the business would keep shrinking regardless of how they differentiated it against incumbents like Sodexo, and chose to scale it down rather than keep funding it.
• January 2023: a partner bank’s regulatory trouble becomes Niyo’s trouble. On 23 January 2023, the Reserve Bank of India directed SBM Bank India to stop all transactions under the Liberalised Remittance Scheme, citing material supervisory concerns unrelated to Niyo itself. Because SBM Bank issued the Niyo Global debit card used for outward remittances, the order immediately paused international transactions for Niyo Global cardholders, even as domestic ATM, UPI, IMPS, POS and e-commerce transactions kept working, as reported by Inc42 in January 2023. Niyo had no direct control over the fix: it could only wait on its partner bank and the regulator.

Both setbacks shared a root cause that the company could not fully engineer away: Niyo does not hold a banking licence, so every product it sells lives or dies by a partner bank’s compliance record or a Finance Ministry policy line it does not write.

The turning point

The pivot that mattered most was not a rescue from a crisis; it was a bet placed while the original business was still shrinking. In August 2018, Niyo announced the Niyo Global card, its first product built around zero currency-exchange markup and zero international transaction fees for outbound travellers, a category it had not previously served at all.

The numbers either side of that launch show how completely it changed the company. Going into 2018, Niyo was a payroll-benefits business working with roughly 500 corporates and around 100,000 salaried employees, per its January 2018 Series A funding announcement covered by Medianama; by the time the Global Card launched later that year it had grown to about 1,200 corporates and 275,000 salaried employees, as reported by The News Minute in 2018, still a modest, India-only, B2B-dependent base. By February 2022, when Niyo closed a $100 million Series C round, TechCrunch reported the company had crossed 4 million customers, and by FY25 that had grown past 6 million users, with roughly 10,000 new sign-ups a day, per Inc42’s October 2025 reporting. The travel card, not the payroll product that gave Niyo its name, became the company’s main growth engine.

The money behind it

• Seed, 2016: early capital from Prime Venture Partners backed the original tax-benefits payroll product before Niyo had a travel business at all.
• Series A, $13.2 million, January 2018: led by Social Capital (Chamath Palihapitiya’s fund) and JS Capital, with Horizons Ventures and existing investor Prime Venture Partners participating, as reported by Medianama and Crowdfund Insider in January 2018. This round funded expansion of the payroll platform into smaller towns just as the tax-benefits business began to face budget-driven headwinds.
• Series B, $35 million, reported July 2019: led by Horizons Ventures and Tencent, with JS Capital and the founders also participating, per Business Standard and Inc42’s coverage; this took Niyo’s cumulative raise to roughly $49 million (Analytics Steps, April 2021) and funded the build-out of the Niyo Global card and Niyo Bharat in parallel.
• Series C, $100 million, February 2022: led by Accel and Lightrock India, with Beams Fintech Fund joining and existing investors Prime Venture Partners and JS Capital participating, as reported by TechCrunch and Business Standard in February 2022. Niyo has said valuation terms were not disclosed for this round.
• Total raised to date: close to $179 million across seven rounds from roughly 13 institutional investors, per Crunchbase and Inc42 aggregation; no priced valuation has been made public for any round after Series A.

How it makes money

Niyo earns the way most card-based neobanks do: not from a visible subscription fee on most products, but from the spread and fees embedded in payment flows it routes.

• Interchange and network fees on every card swipe and online transaction across Niyo Global and Niyo Bharat cards, paid by merchants’ banks through the Visa network Niyo’s partner banks are members of.
• Foreign-exchange spread on Niyo Global card loads: the card avoids the explicit “forex markup fee” banks charge, but conversion still runs at the card network’s rate rather than the pure interbank rate, which is where part of the margin sits.
• Forex buy-and-sell margin through Niyo Forex/Kanji Forex, its RBI-licensed Authorised Dealer Category II business, which lets customers purchase and later sell back foreign currency notes.
• Premium memberships and card fees: partner offers such as the December 2025 Vodafone Idea tie-up bundle a Niyo Premium membership valued at ₹999 with the forex card, indicating a paid-membership layer alongside the free card tier.
• B2B payroll fees from employers using Niyo Bharat to disburse salaries digitally to workers banks traditionally under-served.

The part outsiders most often get wrong is treating “zero forex markup” as meaning Niyo makes nothing on a foreign transaction. It means Niyo does not charge the specific fee line item banks label a “markup”; the underlying network exchange rate and interchange economics still generate revenue, just without a separate, visible charge on the statement.

The numbers

Figures are as reported by Inc42 in its October 2024 (FY24) and October 2025 (FY25) coverage of Niyo’s regulatory filings. Two things stand out. Revenue fell 28.6% in FY24 before rebounding 32% in FY25, an unusually sharp swing for a company that says its user base kept growing throughout; Inc42’s reporting does not explain the FY24 dip in operating revenue despite growing users, so that gap is a genuine open question in the public record rather than one this piece can resolve. Second, the loss-narrowing has been driven mostly by cost discipline rather than revenue scale: total expenses fell in both FY24 and FY25, with employee benefit costs down from ₹111.3 crore (FY23) to ₹90.5 crore (FY24) to ₹78.5 crore (FY25), and advertising spend cut by 59% in FY25 alone, per Inc42.

Where the money comes from

• Product split: Niyo runs three revenue-generating lines side by side — Niyo Global (travel cards), Niyo Bharat (salary accounts) and Niyo Forex (currency exchange) — with the company’s own commentary and press coverage in 2025-26 pointing to forex/travel as the priority growth area (Adgully, February 2026).
• Customer mix, FY25: students make up about 25% of Niyo’s customer base, with Inc42 reporting a “30% adoption surge” in that segment during FY25, alongside overall user growth of roughly 10,000 new sign-ups a day.
• Distribution shift, 2025-26: rather than only acquiring customers directly, Niyo has moved toward partner-led distribution, tying up with Vodafone Idea in December 2025 to offer its zero-forex-markup card to Vi’s subscribers travelling abroad, a channel that reaches Niyo’s core travel-card audience through an existing telecom relationship instead of paid marketing.
• The surprise: the “salary account for blue-collar India” business that gave Niyo its name and its first scale (1,200 corporates, 275,000 employees by 2018) is no longer the headline growth story; the company discontinued its domestic Niyo Pay UPI feature in September 2025 specifically to sharpen focus on cross-border payments and forex, and in February 2026 brought back a former executive, Sai Sankar, as Chief Business Officer for the forex business alone, with plans to add more than 100 roles in FY27 for that vertical, per Adgully’s February 2026 report.

The risks

• Partner-bank dependency: Niyo holds no banking licence, so both its card lines run entirely on the compliance standing of partner banks (DCB Bank, SBM Bank India, YES Bank, ICICI Bank). The January 2023 RBI action against SBM Bank showed this is not theoretical: a supervisory order unrelated to Niyo’s own conduct froze its core international product for weeks before the RBI partially relaxed restrictions in stages up to mid-March 2023, per Inc42 and YourStory’s January 2023 reporting.
• Persistent losses despite smaller scale: even after a 55% cut, Niyo’s FY25 net loss of ₹77.8 crore was still larger than its FY25 revenue of ₹123.4 crore reached only after two years of shrinking or flat operating income, meaning the company remains dependent on further capital or continued cost cuts, not organic profit, to fund growth.
• Regulatory exposure on cross-border flows: as Niyo deliberately re-weights toward forex and cross-border payments (dropping domestic UPI in September 2025), it is concentrating more of its business in a segment, outward remittances under the Liberalised Remittance Scheme, that is precisely where its partner bank was restricted in 2023, making future LRS-related tightening a direct hit to its main growth line rather than a peripheral one.

The takeaway

Niyo’s most important decision was not any single fundraise; it was choosing, in 2018, to let a shrinking business die on schedule rather than keep defending it, and to fund a completely different product for a completely different customer with the same team and licence stack. Most startups treat a policy change that kills their core product as an existential threat to be lobbied against or engineered around. Niyo treated it as a signal to leave, and built the replacement before the original ran out of road. The lesson transfers well beyond fintech: a founding insight is a starting hypothesis about where the friction is, not a permanent identity, and the companies that survive a hostile policy or partner shock are usually the ones that had already started building their next business before they were forced to.

Frequently asked questions

What does Niyo do?

Niyo is an Indian fintech that issues zero-forex-markup travel cards (Niyo Global) with partner banks DCB Bank and SBM Bank India, zero-balance salary accounts for blue-collar and salaried workers (Niyo Bharat) with DCB Bank, YES Bank and ICICI Bank, and runs a currency exchange business (Niyo Forex) through its RBI-licensed Authorised Dealer arm, Kanji Forex Pvt Ltd.

Who founded Niyo, and when?

Vinay Bagri and Virender Bisht founded Niyo in 2015 in Bengaluru; the first product, a tax-efficient payroll benefits platform, launched in July 2016.

How much money has Niyo raised, and who are its investors?

Niyo has raised close to $179 million across seven rounds, per Crunchbase and Inc42, including a $13.2 million Series A in January 2018 (Social Capital, JS Capital, Horizons Ventures), a $35 million Series B reported in July 2019 (Horizons Ventures, Tencent) and a $100 million Series C in February 2022 (Accel, Lightrock India). No priced valuation has been disclosed since Series A.

Is Niyo profitable?

No. Niyo posted a net loss of ₹77.8 crore in FY25 on revenue of ₹123.4 crore, though that loss was down 55% from ₹143.5 crore in FY24, driven mainly by cost cuts rather than revenue growth outpacing spending, per Inc42’s October 2025 reporting.

What happened between Niyo and the RBI in 2023?

On 23 January 2023, the RBI ordered Niyo’s card-issuing partner, SBM Bank India, to halt transactions under the Liberalised Remittance Scheme over supervisory concerns unrelated to Niyo. This froze international transactions on the Niyo Global card until the RBI granted partial relaxations in stages through mid-March 2023.

Sources

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

• Inc42, “Niyo Narrows Losses To INR 143.47 Cr, Revenue Declines 28.6% In FY24” — October 2024
• Inc42, “Neobanking Soonicorn Niyo Cuts FY25 Net Loss by 55% To INR 78 Cr” — October 2025
• Inc42, “Neobank Niyo Users Bear The Brunt As Partner SBM Bank India Comes Under RBI Radar” — January 2023
• YourStory, “RBI gives partial relaxation to SBM Bank India” — January 2023
• TechCrunch, “Indian neobank Niyo raises $100 million, tops 4 million customers” — February 2022
• Business Standard, “Neobanking start-up Niyo raises $100 mn in Series C funding round” — February 2022
• Medianama, “NiYO raises Series A funding of $13.2mn from Social Capital, JS Capital LLC and others” — January 2018
• The News Minute, “B’luru-based startup NiYO launches unique Global Card, makes forex cards redundant” — 2018
• Business Standard, “Neo-banking firm NiYO raises $35 mn from Horizons Ventures, Tencent, others” — July 2019
• Analytics Steps, “Transforming the face of banking through technology, an interview with Niyo CEO Vinay Bagri” — April 2021
• Crunchbase, NiYO Solutions company profile (funding total) — accessed September 2026
• Adgully, “Sai Sankar rejoins Niyo; 100+ forex roles in FY27” — February 2026
• TelecomTalk, “Vodafone Idea Partners with Niyo to Offer Zero Markup Forex Card for International Travellers” — December 2025
• Niyo (goniyo.com blog), “Important Update About Niyo Pay UPI Discontinuation” — September 2025

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