Site icon The Invincible India

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

The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for OneCard.

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

Company OneCard, operated by FPL Technologies Private Limited
Founded 2019, Pune, Maharashtra
Founder(s) Anurag Sinha (co-founder and CEO), Rupesh Kumar, Vibhav Hathi
Businesses OneCard (co-branded metal credit card) and OneScore (free credit-score and credit-management app)
Latest FY revenue ₹1,878 crore, FY25 (year ended 31 March 2025)
Latest FY profit/loss Net loss of ₹297.5 crore, FY25
Listed Private; no IPO announced as of September 2026
Market value / last valuation Reportedly ₹12,050 crore (~$1.27 billion), per its Series D tranche reported July 2026
Key shareholders / CEO Anurag Sinha, CEO; Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia Capital India) is the largest institutional shareholder, followed by Z47 (formerly Matrix Partners India)

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

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.

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.

Fiscal year Revenue (₹ crore) Net loss (₹ crore)
FY23 (ended 31 Mar 2023) 541.16 405.66
FY24 (ended 31 Mar 2024) 1,425.5 401.15
FY25 (ended 31 Mar 2025) 1,878.0 297.5

Where the money comes from

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

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).

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

Exit mobile version