Startup Deep Dive : OneCard — how a company with no banking licence built a Rs 12,050 crore fintech

FPL Technologies Private Limited does not hold a banking licence, an NBFC licence, or a prepaid-instrument licence of any kind. Yet the Pune company built OneCard, the metal credit card that turned itself into a ₹12,050 crore business (about $1.27 billion, at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026, Trading Economics), reported Entrackr on 13 July 2026 after its latest funding tranche.

That contradiction is not incidental, it is the whole story. Every OneCard is legally issued by a partner bank — IDFC First, Federal Bank, SBM Bank India, South Indian Bank, Bank of Baroda, CSB Bank or Indian Bank — while FPL Technologies supplies the app, the underwriting logic and the brand. It works brilliantly until a regulator decides to look closely at the arrangement, which is exactly what happened in December 2025, when the Reserve Bank of India froze new-card issuance across all seven of those partner banks at once.

Quick facts

What they do

OneCard sells a mobile-first, metal, Visa-certified credit card aimed at first-time and digitally native credit users in India — no joining fee, no annual fee, and a companion app that lets a customer track spending, lock categories, and convert purchases to EMIs in real time. The card itself is issued and legally underwritten by a partner bank; FPL Technologies builds the technology layer, the mobile experience and the credit-decisioning logic that sits on top. Alongside OneCard, the company runs OneScore, a free app for checking and tracking credit scores that also acts as its lead-generation funnel: someone checks their score, sees an offer, and converts into a cardholder. As per its own Google Play Store listing (checked September 2026), OneScore is company-stated to be used by more than 6 crore (60 million) Indians.

The origin

Anurag Sinha was not a first-time founder when he started FPL Technologies in 2019. An IIT (BHU) Varanasi and IIM Bangalore graduate who had spent years in banking, including at ICICI Bank, he had already built and sold one fintech company: Walnut, a personal-finance tracking app, which was acquired by Capital Float in 2018. He teamed up with Rupesh Kumar, who had spent close to two decades at ICICI Bank helping build mobile-banking products including iMobile and the bank’s early UPI stack, and Vibhav Hathi, another banking veteran, according to profiles of the founding team. Their shared read on the market was simple: India’s young, digitally fluent borrowers were being handed the same plastic, paper-statement credit card their parents had, from issuers who treated the product as a static piece of plastic rather than software. OneScore came first, as a trust-building, free credit-education product with no revenue model attached. OneCard followed in June 2020, built as an app-native card that could be controlled, tracked and paid off entirely from a phone — with the actual issuing and lending done by a bank partner rather than by FPL Technologies itself, a structural choice that would define the company’s entire trajectory, for better and for worse.

The struggle years

OneCard’s setbacks were not the usual startup near-death stories of running out of cash before product-market fit. They came after the company had already become a unicorn, and they were structural: a business built on other institutions’ licences kept running into the limits of that arrangement.

The first sign of strain was financial. Having closed a Temasek-led round at a $1.4 billion valuation in July 2022, FPL Technologies was back in the market by September 2023 seeking up to $100 million more — at a flat valuation versus the year before, reported Entrackr on 15 September 2023, with existing backers Temasek, Peak XV Partners, QED Investors and Ocean View Investments expected to participate. A “flat” ask from a company barely a year into unicorn status, in the middle of a broader pullback in growth-stage fintech funding, was a quiet admission that investors were no longer willing to pay up for the story. It would take until November 2024 — fourteen months later — for a confirmed round to actually close, and even then for a far smaller sum: ₹239.4 crore (about $28.5 million), a fraction of the $100 million originally sought, reported Entrackr on 25 November 2024.

The second, more severe setback arrived in December 2025 and was regulatory rather than financial. The Reserve Bank of India directed all seven of OneCard’s partner banks — Bank of Baroda, CSB Bank, Federal Bank, IDFC First Bank, SBM Bank India, South Indian Bank and Indian Bank — to stop issuing new co-branded OneCard credit cards, pending clarity on how customer data was being shared between OneCard and its banking partners, reported Inc42 on 6 December 2025. Because FPL Technologies holds no banking or NBFC licence of its own, this single directive froze new-customer acquisition across its entire card portfolio overnight — existing cardholders were unaffected, but the growth engine stopped completely. By 25 April 2026, Entrackr reported that the RBI had appointed an independent audit firm for a unified review of OneCard’s data-sharing and partnership framework, expected to take three to six months, with new issuance still on hold at the time of that report — meaning the company entered its unicorn’s seventh year unable to sign up a single new customer through its core product.

The turning point

The clearest single inflection point in OneCard’s history is compressed into six months in 2022. On 11 January 2022, FPL Technologies announced a $75 million Series C led by QED Investors, alongside Janchor Partners, Sequoia Capital India, Matrix Partners India and Hummingbird Ventures, at a post-money valuation of $750 million, reported Business Standard and BusinessToday the same week; by that point, OneCard had reportedly been issued to over 250,000 customers. Barely six months later, on 13 July 2022, the company closed a Temasek-led Series D of more than $100 million that pushed its valuation to $1.4 billion, making FPL Technologies India’s newest fintech unicorn, reported YourStory and TechCrunch that week, with fintech.global corroborating the figure. The valuation had nearly doubled in half a year, on the back of one lead investor deciding to write a large cheque — a reminder of how much a single institutional signature can move an Indian fintech’s price tag, and how quickly that same reliance on outside sentiment can work in reverse, as it did the following year.

The money behind it

• Seed round: valued the company at roughly $11.5 million, per Entrackr’s reporting of subsequent rounds (February 2021).
• Series A: $10 million, August 2020, led by Matrix Partners India and Sequoia Capital India with Hummingbird Ventures, at a reported post-round valuation of about $51 million (TechCrunch, August 2020).
• Series B: ₹183 crore, February 2021, led by Sequoia Capital India (₹133.26 crore) with Matrix Partners India (₹38.7 crore) and Hummingbird Ventures (₹11 crore); valuation undisclosed (Entrackr, February 2021).
• Series C: $75 million, January 2022, led by QED Investors with Janchor Partners, Sequoia Capital India, Matrix Partners India and Hummingbird Ventures, at a $750 million post-money valuation (Business Standard, BusinessToday, January 2022).
• Series D: $100 million-plus, July 2022, led by Temasek with QED Investors, Sequoia Capital India and Hummingbird Ventures, closing at a $1.4 billion valuation and unicorn status (YourStory, TechCrunch, fintech.global, July 2022).
• Flat-valuation raise sought: up to $100 million reported in talks, September 2023, at a valuation flat versus 2022 (Entrackr).
• Follow-on tranche: ₹239.4 crore (~$28.5 million), November 2024, from Better Tomorrow Ventures, Peak XV Partners and Z47, at a post-allotment valuation of about ₹11,747 crore (~$1.4 billion) (Entrackr, November 2024); QED Investors joined leading a further close of the same round in December 2024 (Crowdfund Insider).
• Latest tranche: ₹72 crore (~$7.6 million), reported July 2026, led by Peak XV Partners with Z47, Hummingbird Ventures and a group of angel investors, at a reported ₹12,050 crore valuation (~$1.27 billion) (Entrackr, July 2026).
• Total raised: over $262 million in equity funding to date as of late 2024, per Tracxn and Crowdfund Insider, before the further 2025-26 tranches and venture-debt top-ups (including a ₹4.5 million venture-debt round reported by Tracxn in December 2025).

Three backers stand out for what they specifically changed. Sequoia Capital India (now Peak XV Partners) came in at Series A in 2020 and has stayed the largest institutional shareholder through every round since, anchoring the company’s credibility with later investors. QED Investors, a specialist fintech investor, joined at Series C in January 2022 and went on to lead the December 2024 tranche, bringing global credit-underwriting expertise that a purely India-focused cap table lacked. Temasek’s entry as lead investor in the July 2022 round was the single event that took FPL Technologies over the unicorn line, signalling institutional, sovereign-fund-grade validation at a moment competitors were struggling to raise at all.

How it makes money

OneCard does not lend from its own balance sheet — the credit itself sits with the issuing bank. FPL Technologies earns by being the technology and distribution layer on top of that lending relationship.

• Interchange income: a share of the fee a merchant pays every time a OneCard is swiped, tapped or used online, split with the issuing bank.
• EMI conversion charges: interest earned when a cardholder converts a purchase into instalments, a published rate of around 1.33% a month on conversions above ₹3,000 on the company’s own fee schedule.
• Forex markup: a 1% fee on international transactions, positioned by the company as roughly a third of what legacy card issuers typically charge.
• Partner and brand commissions: merchants and brands pay to be featured in the app’s offers and rewards marketplace.
• Late fees and revolving interest on unpaid balances, though the company positions transparency and usage-based income, rather than penalty fees, as its stated differentiator.

The part most outsiders get wrong is assuming OneCard is a lender the way a bank is. It is closer to a marketing, underwriting-support and servicing layer that a bank rents in exchange for a cut of the interchange and fee pool — which is precisely why a bank-level regulatory freeze, as happened in December 2025, can stop its growth instantly without a single rupee of OneCard’s own loan book going bad. FPL Technologies’ FY25 filings show where the margin actually sits: the company spent ₹1.17 for every ₹1 of revenue it earned, an improvement from ₹1.31 spent per rupee in FY24, according to Entrackr’s analysis of its FY25 numbers (December 2025) — the unit economics were getting less bad, not yet good.

The numbers

Figures below are revenue from operations and net loss as reported from Registrar of Companies filings, in ₹ crore.

• FY24 revenue rose 163% year-on-year on a low FY23 base, per Inc42’s reporting of RoC filings (December 2024).
• FY25 revenue rose 32% year-on-year to ₹1,878 crore, while the net loss fell 26% to ₹297.5 crore, per Entrackr (December 2025).
• FY25 total expenses stood at ₹2,206 crore; advertising and promotional spend fell 40% to ₹294 crore from ₹488 crore in FY24, while employee benefit expense rose 26% to ₹181.5 crore (Entrackr, December 2025).
• FY25 ROCE was -41.03% and EBITDA margin was -15.71% (Entrackr, December 2025).
• Cash and bank balances stood at ₹321 crore and current assets at ₹907 crore at FY25 close (Entrackr, December 2025).

Where the money comes from

• Product concentration: OneCard’s co-branded card business and the OneScore app together were “the sole source of income for the company” in FY25 — there is no separate, disclosed revenue line beyond this combined credit-card-and-app business, per Entrackr’s review of the FY25 filing (December 2025).
• Geographic concentration: FPL Technologies operates only in India, through Indian banking partners; no international revenue has been disclosed.
• Distribution concentration: as of December 2025, all new-card issuance ran through seven partner banks — Bank of Baroda, CSB Bank, Federal Bank, IDFC First Bank, SBM Bank India, South Indian Bank and Indian Bank — rather than any lending entity FPL Technologies itself controls (Inc42, December 2025).

The surprise is less about geography or product line, since there is effectively only one of each, and more about control: a company that markets itself, in its own advertising, as though OneCard were its own product is, by its own terms and conditions, only ever the technology and brand layer — “OneCard means the co-branded credit card managed by FPL Technologies Pvt. Ltd and Bank here is an issuer of the OneCard credit card,” as the company’s own terms put it, reported by Inc42 in a June 2022 feature on co-branded card regulation. Every rupee of revenue therefore depends on seven separate banking relationships continuing to function smoothly with one regulator.

The risks

• Licence dependency: FPL Technologies holds no banking, NBFC or prepaid-instrument licence; every card is issued and lent against by a partner bank. When the RBI paused all seven partner banks from issuing new OneCard cards in December 2025 over data-sharing concerns, the company’s entire new-customer funnel stopped in a single directive, with restart still pending an audit as of April 2026 (Inc42, December 2025; Entrackr, April 2026).
• Persistent unprofitability: FY25 net loss was ₹297.5 crore on ₹1,878 crore of revenue, with ROCE at -41.03% and every rupee of revenue costing ₹1.17 to generate; losses have narrowed for two straight years but the company has not yet demonstrated profitability at any point in its RoC-filed history (Entrackr, December 2025).
• Fundraising dependence on sentiment, not fundamentals: valuation stayed essentially flat, in rupee terms, from the $1.4 billion July 2022 round through the ₹11,747 crore November 2024 round and the ₹12,050 crore mid-2026 tranche, even as revenue nearly quadrupled — heavily discounted growth-stage capital, and a company that still needed venture debt (a ₹4.5 million round reported in December 2025, per Tracxn) alongside equity to keep funding customer acquisition.

The takeaway

OneCard’s story is a caution against mistaking brand control for business control. FPL Technologies built a product experience good enough that most of its customers believe they are banking with OneCard, not with IDFC First or Federal Bank or SBM Bank India. That illusion of ownership is the entire product, and it worked well enough to build a multi-thousand-crore-revenue business inside seven years. But the moment a single regulator raised a question about how data moved between the app layer and the licensed layer, every bank partner froze at once, and no amount of app-store ratings or five-times-rewards marketing could unfreeze it. The transferable lesson for any founder building a fintech, or any consumer brand, on top of someone else’s licence: your growth ceiling and your existential risk are set by the institution that actually holds the licence, not by how good your app is.

Frequently asked questions

Who owns OneCard?

OneCard is a product of FPL Technologies Private Limited, a Pune-based company founded in 2019 by Anurag Sinha, Rupesh Kumar and Vibhav Hathi. The card itself is issued by partner banks such as IDFC First Bank, Federal Bank and SBM Bank India, with FPL Technologies providing the technology, app and brand layer.

Is OneCard a bank or an NBFC?

No. FPL Technologies does not hold a banking, NBFC or prepaid-instrument licence. It operates a co-branded credit card model in which regulated banks issue and lend against the card, while FPL Technologies runs the technology, underwriting-support and customer experience.

Is OneCard profitable?

Not as of its latest reported financial year. FPL Technologies posted revenue of ₹1,878 crore against a net loss of ₹297.5 crore in FY25 (year ended 31 March 2025), an improvement from a ₹401.15 crore loss in FY24, per RoC filings reported by Entrackr in December 2025.

What is FPL Technologies’ latest valuation?

Its most recently reported valuation is around ₹12,050 crore (about $1.27 billion), from a Series D tranche reported by Entrackr in July 2026, broadly flat in rupee terms with the ₹11,747 crore valuation from its November 2024 round.

Why did OneCard stop issuing new credit cards in late 2025?

The Reserve Bank of India directed all seven of OneCard’s partner banks to pause new co-branded card issuance in December 2025, pending a review of data-sharing practices between OneCard and its bank partners. Existing cardholders were unaffected. An independent audit firm was appointed by April 2026, with a review expected to take three to six months, per Entrackr.

Sources

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

• Entrackr, “OneCard posts Rs 1,878 Cr revenue in FY25, cuts losses by 26%” — December 2025
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: OneCard may restart issuance as RBI appoints firm for unified audit” — April 2026
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: OneCard to raise Rs 72 Cr in its ongoing Series D round led by Peak XV” — July 2026
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: OneCard to secure $28.5 Mn in new funding round” — November 2024
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: Fintech unicorn OneCard seeks $100 Mn at flat valuation” — September 2023
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: OneCard maker FPL Tech scores Rs 183 Cr Series B round” — February 2021
• Inc42, “OneCard’s FY24 Revenue Surges 2.6X To INR 1,425 Cr” — December 2024
• Inc42, “OneCard Under RBI Scanner; New Card Issuance Suspended Across Banks” — December 2025
• Inc42, “How One RBI Notification Shattered Hopes Of India’s Fintech Ecosystem” — June 2022
• YourStory, “OneCard joins unicorn club after raising $100M in Series D funding” — July 2022
• TechCrunch, “Temasek in talks to invest in OneCard at $1.5 billion valuation” — July 2022
• TechCrunch, “India’s OneCard credit card maker FPL Technologies lands $10 million” — August 2020
• fintech.global, “FPL Technologies becomes India’s newest FinTech unicorn” — July 2022
• Business Standard, “Pune’s fintech startup FPL Technologies valuation jumps to $750 million” — January 2022
• BusinessToday, “Fintech start up FPL Technologies raises $75 mn in funding at $750 mn valuation” — January 2022
• Crowdfund Insider, “One Card Raises $25.5M In Funding From QED Investors, BTV, Others” — December 2024
• Tracxn, OneCard company profile — accessed September 2026
• Google Play Store, “OneScore: Credit Score App” listing — accessed September 2026

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