Startup Deep Dive : PayMe India — PayMe has lent Rs 2,100 crore on just $2 million in funding

PayMe has pushed more than ₹2,100 crore ($218.8 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0, 18 September 2026, Trading Economics) in loans out the door since 2016 — built on disclosed outside funding of just $2 million. In 2022, its founder told an interviewer an IPO could land within a couple of quarters. Four years on, PayMe is still a private lender, its own revenue numbers are hard to pin down across the companies that make up the group, and no valuation has ever been made public.

That gap between the ambition and the paperwork is the story of PayMe (legally PayMe India, run out of Huey Tech Private Limited, Noida). It started as a banker’s side answer to a simple, well-documented problem — India’s salaried workers running out of month before they ran out of salary — and has spent a decade bolting on a buy-now-pay-later app, a loan-against-property book, an in-house NBFC, and an AI credit coach called Credit Assist. What it has not done is raise much money, go public, or make its books easy to read. Here is what the record actually shows.

Quick facts

What PayMe does

PayMe is a digital lender that sells short-tenure, unsecured personal credit to salaried employees and self-employed borrowers, mostly in tier 2 and tier 3 India, with a stated tilt toward northern and central states (company interview, TechGraph, December 2025). Loans run from ₹500 to ₹5 lakh, over three to 24 months (extendable to 36), at interest starting near 1.5% a month — about 18% a year — and rising with risk, per the company’s own personal-loan page. Around this core, PayMe has layered a loan-against-property product, a buy-now-pay-later app called SALT (run under Salt Club), and Credit Assist, a free AI tool that tracks a user’s credit score and nudges EMI repayment. The company describes its target user as blue-collar workers, young earners, freelancers and small business owners who banks tend to skip (TechGraph interview, December 2025).

The origin

Mahesh Shukla spent five years in banking — at Bank of America, then Barclays Shared Services as a financial analyst leading its fintech vertical — before he started PayMe in August 2016 with childhood friend Sandeep Singh (YourStory; Crunchbase). The insight was not exotic: most of India’s workforce is paid monthly but spends unevenly, and the formal system barely serves the gap. PayMe’s own account of the problem, published on its blog, cites that close to 89% of Indians earn under ₹14,000 a month and only about 5% have any access to a salary advance. Whether or not that specific number holds today, it captures the wedge PayMe built around: rather than another personal loan app competing for prime salaried borrowers, it went after the “advance on next month’s salary” product first, aimed at the employees any given lender would rather ignore.

The company started as a Lending Service Provider — sourcing and servicing loans that were funded on the books of partner NBFCs and banks, not its own. That distinction matters more than it sounds: an LSP earns fees for origination and collection, but it does not control pricing, capital, or the balance sheet risk. For its first three years, PayMe was, in effect, a technology and underwriting layer sitting on top of somebody else’s money.

The struggle years

The first documented strain was structural. Running as an LSP through 2016-2018 meant PayMe’s growth was capped by how much capital its partner NBFCs were willing to put behind its underwriting model, and by the margin those partners kept for taking on the credit risk. The $2 million PayMe raised from Singapore-based angel investors in April 2018 was explicitly earmarked for “capacity and market expansion” (YourStory, Business Standard, Inc42, all April 2018) — a fairly modest sum for a lender trying to scale a loan book, and a sign that the company was still capital-constrained three years after it opened.

The second strain came later, and it is really a gap between word and outcome. In a July 2022 interview, Shukla said PayMe was “very close to finalise some deals with venture capitalists and angel investors” and floated an IPO “by the Q4 of FY 2022” (IndiaInfoline, July 2022). Neither materialised on that timeline. Inc42’s funding record shows only two rounds for PayMe to date — the 2018 angel round and an undisclosed-size seed round dated 11-12 February 2021 — and no listing has followed. Four years past that interview, PayMe is still privately held, with its equity base thin enough that the NBFC arm’s paid-up capital sat at just ₹12.48 crore as of its FY21 filing (Tofler). A lender that talks about an IPO but keeps raising in low single-digit millions is, on the numbers, growing mostly on debt and retained earnings rather than fresh equity.

The turning point

The clearest before-and-after line in PayMe’s history is 25 June 2019, the date the company says it received its NBFC Certificate of Registration from the Reserve Bank of India under Section 45(1A) of the RBI Act, 1934 (PayMe company blog). Before that date, PayMe was a loan originator dependent on partner balance sheets. After it, PayMe India Financial Services Private Limited — renamed ScaleUp Financial Services Private Limited in May 2026 — could lend directly, keep the interest margin instead of sharing it with a partner NBFC, and design products (loan against property, longer tenures, larger tickets) that an LSP arrangement would not easily support.

The numbers either side of that line tell the same story at different scales. Going into the NBFC license, PayMe’s own 2018 funding announcement put its cumulative loan disbursals at roughly ₹56 crore ($8.3 million) against about 43,000 customers (Inc42, April 2018). By its 10th Foundation Day on 7 August 2026, the company said cumulative disbursals had passed ₹2,100 crore, and headcount — 150-plus in 2022 (IndiaInfoline) — had grown to roughly 338 (Inc42 company data, 2026). Owning the licence did not by itself create that growth, but it removed the one structural constraint — dependence on someone else’s balance sheet — that had capped PayMe for its first three years.

The money behind it

PayMe’s funding history is unusually thin for a lender a decade old, and largely undisclosed in size after 2018:

• April 2018 – angel round: $2 million from Singapore-based angel investors, including Rishi Bhasin (then associate director, Darashaw and Company); Crunchbase-sourced data also names Alok Garodia, Pramod Singhal, Rajiv Punater and Shashank Sharma among the company’s angel backers. Stated use: capacity and market expansion (YourStory, Business Standard, Inc42, all April 2018).
• February 2021 – seed round: A further round dated 11-12 February 2021; amount undisclosed (Inc42 funding data).
• Total disclosed funding: $2 million across two rounds, as of the company’s current Inc42 and Crunchbase-aggregated profiles — making PayMe one of the more lightly capitalised active NBFC-linked lenders of its vintage.
• Latest valuation: Not disclosed anywhere in company statements, press coverage or the deal databases checked for this piece (Crunchbase, Wellfound, PitchBook, Tracxn listings).
• What the backers changed: the named angels were not strategic investors with board seats reported in the press; coverage frames the 2018 round as expansion capital rather than a partnership that reshaped the product. The bigger shift in PayMe’s trajectory came from regulation (the 2019 NBFC licence), not from its cap table.

How it makes money

PayMe earns the way most unsecured consumer NBFCs do: on the spread between what it charges borrowers and what it costs to fund and service the loan book.

• Interest income: the core revenue line, charged on personal loans and salary advances starting near 1.5% a month (about 18% annualised) and running higher for riskier borrowers, per PayMe’s own personal-loan page; third-party aggregators cite a broader 18-36% per annum band across its products.
• Processing fees: typically 2-10% of the loan amount, collected upfront (PayMe personal-loan page).
• BNPL merchant and finance charges: through the Salt Club/SALT app, which lets users pay in EMIs at the point of sale via scan-and-pay or merchant checkout without needing a credit card (IBS Intelligence; company product pages).
• Co-lending and on-book interest via the NBFC arm: since June 2019, ScaleUp Financial Services (formerly PayMe India Financial Services) can hold loans on its own book rather than passing all origination through third-party NBFCs, letting PayMe capture more of the interest margin directly.

The part outsiders tend to get wrong, per Shukla’s own framing in interviews, is treating PayMe as a payday-loan app rather than a credit-underwriting business: the company describes its edge as an automated backend that scores non-traditional borrowers — using bank transaction patterns, digital payment history and, for the self-employed, business metadata such as GST filings and customer reviews — where a bank’s standard bureau-based check would simply decline them (DQIndia interview; TechGraph interview, December 2025). Credit Assist, the free credit-monitoring app, does not appear to carry its own disclosed revenue line; its role looks more like a retention and data tool that keeps borrowers inside the PayMe ecosystem between loans.

The numbers

Clean, multi-year financials are the weakest part of PayMe’s public record, and that gap is itself worth stating plainly rather than papering over.

• FY24-FY25 revenue: ₹34.8 crore growing to ₹58.6 crore, a reported 68.1% jump, attributed to Huey Tech Private Limited, PayMe’s parent legal entity (Inc42 company data, accessed September 2026).
• A conflicting read: a separate registry aggregator, TheCompanyCheck, lists Huey Tech Private Limited’s FY24 revenue at just ₹3,485 (not in crore) — several orders of magnitude below Inc42’s figure for the same entity and year. The likeliest explanation is that PayMe’s actual lending revenue sits inside the NBFC entity (ScaleUp Financial Services, formerly PayMe India Financial Services) rather than in the Huey Tech holding company whose filings TheCompanyCheck is reading; this piece cannot resolve the discrepancy with public data and flags both readings rather than picking one.
• NBFC-entity profitability (FY21, the only year with disclosed margins): PayMe India Financial Services Private Limited posted an operating margin of -38.12%, a net profit margin of -31.66% and a return on equity of -51.1%, with EBITDA down 192.3% and net profit down 345.68% year-on-year, even as net worth rose 94.5% and total assets grew 14.42% (Tofler). That combination — shrinking profitability alongside growing assets and equity — points to a lender that was still buying growth at a loss three years after getting its licence.
• Cumulative lending scale: total loan disbursals since inception passed ₹2,100 crore by the 10th Foundation Day on 7 August 2026, up from about ₹56 crore disclosed in April 2018 (Mediabrief; Inc42).
• Company-stated recent trajectory: Shukla told TechGraph in December 2025 that the business was growing 44% year-on-year with non-performing assets held below 2.3%, without specifying which metric the growth figure applies to — a company-stated number, not an audited one, and reported here as such.

Where the money comes from

PayMe does not publish a revenue split by product or geography, so what follows is a description of its live business lines and stated customer focus, not a verified percentage breakdown.

• Personal loans and salary advances: the original and still-central product, small-ticket advances against next month’s salary and general-purpose personal loans up to ₹5 lakh.
• Loan against property: a larger-ticket, longer-tenure product added as the company built out its own NBFC book (Mediabrief, August 2026).
• Salt Club / SALT buy-now-pay-later: point-of-sale financing for users without a credit card, launched as a separate app under the same legal entity, Huey Tech (IBS Intelligence; TheCompanyCheck).
• Credit Assist: a free AI credit-health app aimed at users aged 18 and above, positioned as an entry point into the PayMe ecosystem rather than a fee-generating product in its own right (Mediabrief, August 2026).
• Geographic and customer tilt: PayMe describes its base as concentrated among blue-collar workers, young earners, freelancers and small business owners in tier 2 and tier 3 cities, with a stated stronger presence in northern and central India (TechGraph interview, December 2025) — a segment most mainstream banks price out or ignore.
• The surprise: a company built on small personal loans has, over a decade, ended up running four distinct products — lending, BNPL, secured property loans and a free credit-scoring app — under one holding structure, with no public disclosure of which one actually carries the business.

The risks

• Borrower concentration in an income-shock-sensitive segment: PayMe’s stated customers — salaried staff earning from roughly ₹15,000 a month, self-employed borrowers, gig workers and small business owners — are the group most exposed to job loss, wage delays or a slowing local economy, and PayMe’s product is unsecured, short-tenure credit against exactly that income (company eligibility criteria; TechGraph interview).
• Tightening recovery and digital-lending regulation: the RBI has moved to strengthen its framework on loan-recovery conduct and communication for lenders and their agents, with the revised rules taking effect from 1 January 2027 — a compliance and cost overhead that will apply to every NBFC collecting on unsecured retail loans, PayMe’s ScaleUp entity included.
• A thin, debt-heavy capital base: with only ₹12.48 crore in paid-up NBFC capital as of FY21 and $2 million in total disclosed external equity since 2016, PayMe’s ability to keep growing its loan book leans on borrowings — which were already rising faster than revenue in the NBFC’s FY21 filings — rather than on a deep equity cushion, a structural vulnerability if funding costs rise or lenders to PayMe itself tighten terms.

The takeaway

PayMe’s most transferable lesson is not about lending at all: it is about what actually changes a constrained business, versus what just sounds like it will. Three years of angel funding and press coverage did not unlock PayMe’s growth curve; a single regulatory licence, converting it from a fee-earning originator into a capital-holding lender, did. The company’s founder has, at various points, talked up funding rounds and an IPO that did not show up in the record on the stated timeline. What did show up, on a much longer clock, was a decade of compounding a fairly plain insight — that most of India’s workforce is paid monthly but spends unevenly — into ₹2,100 crore of cumulative lending. For a founder or operator watching from outside, the pattern is worth noting: structural control over your own balance sheet, capital or otherwise, tends to move the needle more than the next funding headline.

Frequently asked questions

What does PayMe India do?

PayMe is a digital lender offering short-tenure personal loans and salary advances, mostly to salaried and self-employed borrowers in tier 2 and tier 3 India, alongside a loan-against-property product, a buy-now-pay-later app called SALT, and a free credit-monitoring app, Credit Assist.

Who founded PayMe India, and when?

Mahesh Shukla, a former Barclays and Bank of America banking professional, started PayMe in August 2016 in Noida with childhood friend Sandeep Singh.

Is PayMe India profitable?

Not clearly, on the public record. PayMe has not disclosed rupee profit or loss figures for recent years; the only fiscal year with disclosed margins, FY21, showed the NBFC entity running at a net loss, with a -31.66% net margin and -51.1% return on equity (Tofler).

How much funding has PayMe India raised, and what is it worth?

Disclosed funding totals $2 million across two rounds — an April 2018 angel round and an undisclosed-size February 2021 seed round. No public valuation has ever been reported for the company.

Is PayMe India a listed company?

No. PayMe remains privately held as of September 2026. Its founder floated a possible IPO “by Q4 FY22” in a July 2022 interview, but no listing has followed.

Sources

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

• Inc42, “PayMe India — Funding, Revenue & Investors” and funding-rounds page, company database, accessed September 2026
• Inc42 Buzz, “Online Lending Startup PayMe India Raises $2 Mn In Angel Funding,” April 2018
• YourStory, “Online lending startup PayMe India raises $2 M from Singapore-based angel investors,” April 2018
• Business Standard, “PayMe India raises USD 2 mn from Singaporean Angel Investors,” April 2018
• Mediabrief, “PayMe India Marks 10 Years with ₹2,100 Crore in Loan Disbursals,” August 2026
• PayMe company blog, “PayMe India Receives NBFC Certificate from RBI”
• Adgully, “PayMe India Financial Services rebrands as Scaleup Financial Services,” 2026
• Tofler, company financial filings for Payme India Financial Services Private Limited (FY21) and Huey Tech Private Limited (FY24)
• TheCompanyCheck, “Huey Tech Private Limited — FY 2025 Insights”
• IndiaInfoline, “Mahesh Shukla, CEO & Founder, PayMe India,” July 2022
• TechGraph, “Beyond Instant Approvals: PayMe CEO Mahesh Shukla on Building Compliant Lending for India’s New Credit Economy,” December 2025
• DQIndia, “Innovation at PayMe is built on foundation of ethical AI: Mahesh Shukla”
• IBS Intelligence, “PayMe India launches ‘Buy Now Pay Later’ feature on ‘SALT’ app”
• PayMe India, personal loan product page, paymeindia.in
• Crunchbase, PayMe India company and person (Mahesh Shukla) profiles

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