Startup Deep Dive : Signzy — how a KYC vendor grew revenue eightfold in four years while still losing money

In September 2022, a Bengaluru-founded company that most bank customers have never heard of told the market it had crossed 10 million customer and business onboardings a month, working with the four largest banks in India and a top acquiring bank in the United States. The company was Signzy, and by its own count it was quietly sitting inside the sign-up screens of hundreds of regulated institutions. The contradiction is that for all that reach, Signzy was still a small business by revenue: its operating revenue in FY21 was ₹18.47 crore, as Entrackr reported from the company’s Registrar of Companies filing.

Three years later the gap between reach and receipts had narrowed sharply. Signzy’s revenue rose to ₹151.0 crore in FY25 (about $15.7 million, converting at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026), up roughly 36% from FY24, according to Inc42’s reading of the company’s MCA filings. It is still loss-making. This is the story of how three founders who set out to digitise legal contracts ended up building identity-verification plumbing for banks, and what the numbers say about whether that plumbing pays.

Quick facts

What Signzy does

Signzy sells the software that lets a regulated financial institution say “yes, this is a real customer” without a human meeting them. Its platform runs digital onboarding, Know Your Customer (KYC) and Know Your Business (KYB) checks, video-KYC, and anti-money-laundering (AML) screening, and it packages these as configurable, low-code building blocks that a bank’s product team can assemble into a sign-up flow. The buyer is almost never a consumer; it is a bank, a non-banking financial company (NBFC), an insurer, an asset manager or a fintech that has to verify identity to open an account under Indian and international regulation.

• Core products: identity verification, document verification, video-KYC, KYB/business verification, and AML/sanctions screening, sold as APIs and a no-code workflow builder the company markets as “GO”.
• Who buys it: banks, NBFCs, insurers, AMCs and fintechs; early named clients from the company’s 2020 filing included State Bank of India, ICICI Bank, Aditya Birla Sun Life AMC and BoB Financial (Entrackr, October 2020).
• Where it operates: India as home market, with offices and clients in the United States and the Middle East (company-stated, Entrackr, September 2022).

The origin

Signzy began not with banking but with contracts. Ankit Ratan, an IIT Delhi graduate, started in 2014 trying to make legally valid electronic contracts work, an idea he has said took shape while he was working through a Coursera project. He brought in his twin brother Arpit Ratan, a law graduate from ILS Law College in Pune, and their friend Ankur Pandey from IIT Kharagpur. The three had complementary parts of the same problem: Ankit understood data and fraud detection, Arpit understood the legal weight a document needs to carry, and Ankur could build the product.

The insight that turned a contracts idea into a company was narrower and more useful. Indian banking had digitised almost everything except the first step, verifying who a customer is. That step still meant paper forms, photocopies and branch visits. The founders decided the money was not in the contract but in the trust layer underneath it, the ability to prove an identity is genuine and to do it in seconds. Forbes India named the founders in its 30 Under 30 list in 2017, describing Signzy as an attempt to build digital banking’s trust infrastructure. The company was formally incorporated on 3 November 2015, per its MCA record.

The struggle years

Selling software to banks is slow, and Signzy spent years small. In FY21, the year ending March 2021, its operating revenue was only ₹18.47 crore even though that was a 68% jump over the prior year, and it lost ₹1.43 crore, according to Entrackr’s reading of the company’s filing. Those are the numbers of a company still finding its footing, not one dominating a market.

The early path was also a series of redefinitions. The founders started around digitising legal contracts in 2014, then narrowed to identity and KYC as the part banks would actually pay for. Regulation kept moving the target: video-KYC only became a usable channel in India after the Reserve Bank of India permitted video-based customer identification, which reshaped what onboarding products could legally do and forced vendors to rebuild flows around new rules. Signzy’s answer was to lean into the compliance angle rather than fight it, positioning itself as the layer that keeps a bank inside the rules while it grows. The struggle was less a single near-death than the grind of long enterprise sales cycles and thin revenue while the founders waited for digital onboarding to become mandatory rather than optional.

The turning point

The turn is visible in the revenue line, and it happened after Signzy stopped being only an Indian KYC vendor and became infrastructure that scaled with transaction volume. By September 2022, when it raised its Series B, the company said it was processing over 10 million onboardings a month and serving more than 240 financial institutions, including the four largest banks in India and a top acquiring bank in the US. Set the two moments side by side. In FY21 the business turned over ₹18.47 crore. By FY24 operating revenue had reached ₹111.1 crore, and in FY25 it reached ₹151.0 crore, according to Inc42’s reading of the MCA filings. That is revenue roughly eight times larger in four years, driven by the shift from selling one-off KYC checks to embedding a metered verification layer inside high-volume banking flows. The cost of the turn is that Signzy scaled its losses too, spending ahead of revenue to win and keep large regulated accounts.

The money behind it

Signzy has raised across roughly seven to nine rounds since 2016, with the following shape:

• Seed, from November 2016: Kalaari Capital made its first investment in Signzy (Tracxn, via search).
• Series A, from 2018 into 2020: an early tranche of about $3.6 million led by Stellaris Venture Partners and Kalaari Capital in November 2018, with the company reported to be valued at over ₹250 crore post-money at that point (search summary of Dealroom/Tracxn).
• October 2020 extension, $5.4 million: led by Arkam Ventures and Mastercard, with Kalaari and Stellaris participating; Entrackr reported the round as ₹34.11 crore at a post-money valuation above ₹250 crore, with Arkam taking about 5.37% and Mastercard about 1.36% (Entrackr, October 2020).
• Series B, September 2022, $26 million (about ₹210 crore as reported at the time): led by Gaja Capital with existing backers Vertex Ventures and Arkam Ventures; Entrackr put total raised to date at about $35 million after this round (Entrackr, 26 September 2022; corroborated by the company blog and FinTech Futures).
• Total raised: Inc42’s 2026 profile lists over $40 million across the company’s rounds; the Series B remains the last priced equity round.

What each backer changed is worth naming. Mastercard’s 2020 investment did more than add cash; it tied Signzy to a global payments network and, over time, a partner-program relationship that gave the startup a route to banks outside India. Gaja Capital’s 2022 lead gave it growth capital and, per the MCA director list, board representation (Imran Jafar of Gaja sits among the directors, alongside Alok Goyal of Stellaris and Piyush Kharbanda of Vertex, per Tofler). No official post-money valuation was disclosed at the Series B; third-party trackers have since estimated the company at roughly $134.6 million (getlatka) to $150 million (CB Insights, 2022 reference), figures the company has not confirmed and which should be read as estimates, not disclosures.

How it makes money

Signzy is a business-to-business software company, and its economics follow the usual pattern of regulated-infrastructure SaaS:

• Money in: subscription and usage-based fees. Banks and fintechs pay for the platform and are charged per verification, per onboarding or per API call, so revenue scales with the client’s transaction volume rather than with a flat licence.
• Where the margin sits: software gross margins are structurally high, but a chunk of each verification carries a variable cost, the fee Signzy pays to pull a government or bureau data source (for example an identity or business-registry check). That third-party data cost is the part outsiders often miss when they assume a KYC API is pure software margin.
• Costs out: the dominant cost is people, engineering and enterprise sales, plus the compliance and security investment needed to sell to banks. Signzy’s total expenses reached ₹184.2 crore in FY25 against ₹151.0 crore of revenue (Inc42), which is why it is still loss-making.
• The moat: switching costs. Once a KYC and AML flow is embedded in a bank’s core onboarding and has passed the bank’s audit and regulator scrutiny, ripping it out is expensive and risky, which supports retention and expansion within each account.

The numbers

Signzy’s reported financials, drawn from its MCA filings as read by Inc42 and Entrackr, show fast top-line growth alongside persistent losses. Figures are in ₹ crore.

• Growth: revenue rose about 72.1% from FY23 (₹64.6 crore) to FY24 (₹111.1 crore), then about 36% to FY25 (₹151.0 crore) (Inc42).
• Losses widening in absolute terms: the net loss moved from ₹1.43 crore in FY21 to ₹30.8 crore in FY24 and to roughly ₹32.6 to ₹33.2 crore in FY25 (Entrackr for FY21; Inc42 for FY24 and FY25).
• Expense base: total expenses were about ₹184.2 crore in FY25, and total assets about ₹230.7 crore (Inc42).
• Loss as a share of revenue is falling: the FY25 net margin was around -22% (Inc42), an improvement over the deeper relative losses of earlier growth years, which is the metric to watch on the path to break-even.

Where the money comes from

Signzy does not publish a clean audited segment table in public summaries, but the disclosed shape of the business points to a few concentration points:

• Client type: revenue is weighted toward large regulated institutions. The company has said it serves the four largest banks in India plus a top US acquiring bank, so a small number of big accounts likely drive a large share of billings (company-stated, September 2022).
• Geography: India is the home market, with the United States and the Middle East as the stated expansion geographies, supported by offices in New York and Dubai (company-stated; Inc42 lists a New York base).
• Usage-linked billing: because pricing is tied to onboardings and verifications, revenue tracks clients’ own growth; the company’s claim of over 10 million monthly onboardings is the volume metric that most directly maps to that revenue (company-stated, September 2022).
• The surprise: despite an India-first story, the company is registered with its office in Mumbai (Maharashtra) per MCA, is often profiled with a New York base, and counts a global payments network, Mastercard, among its shareholders, so its identity is genuinely cross-border rather than purely domestic.

The risks

• Persistent losses and capital dependence: Signzy spent about ₹184.2 crore to earn ₹151.0 crore in FY25 (Inc42). Until the loss closes, the company depends on raised capital, and its last priced round was in September 2022; a long gap without a fresh priced round can pressure valuation and hiring.
• Client concentration: if a handful of very large banks drive most billings, losing or being repriced by even one major account would hit revenue disproportionately. High switching costs cut both ways, protecting incumbents but making each renewal high-stakes.
• Regulatory and data-source dependence: the business is built on rules (RBI KYC and video-KYC norms) and on access to government and bureau identity data. A change in permitted verification methods, in data-access pricing, or in privacy regulation could raise Signzy’s variable cost per check or force costly re-engineering of flows.
• Competition: identity verification in India is crowded, with rivals such as IDfy and others chasing the same regulated buyers; IDfy’s reported Series F in 2025 signals well-funded competition and possible consolidation pressure in the category (search summary).

The takeaway

Signzy’s most transferable lesson is about where value sits in a digitising industry. The founders did not win by building the flashy front end of banking; they won by owning the boring, mandatory step that every regulated institution has to perform and would rather not build itself. Identity verification is unglamorous, regulation-bound and invisible to end customers, which is exactly why it became defensible: once embedded and audited, it is expensive to replace. The open question, and the one the numbers still have not answered, is whether infrastructure this deeply embedded can also be priced high enough to turn a profit, or whether being everywhere at low margin is its own kind of trap. Reach came first. Returns are the part Signzy is still proving.

Frequently asked questions

What does Signzy do?

Signzy sells software that lets banks, NBFCs, insurers and fintechs verify customer and business identity digitally, running KYC, KYB, video-KYC and AML checks through APIs and a low-code workflow builder, so an institution can onboard a customer without a branch visit.

Who founded Signzy and when?

Signzy was founded by Ankit Ratan (CEO), his twin brother Arpit Ratan, and Ankur Pandey. The company, Signzy Technologies Private Limited, was incorporated on 3 November 2015 per its MCA record.

How much money has Signzy raised?

Its largest round was a $26 million Series B (about ₹210 crore) led by Gaja Capital in September 2022, with Vertex Ventures and Arkam Ventures participating. Inc42’s 2026 profile puts total funding at over $40 million across its rounds; earlier backers include Kalaari Capital, Stellaris Venture Partners and Mastercard.

Is Signzy profitable?

No. Signzy reported revenue of about ₹151.0 crore in FY25 against total expenses of about ₹184.2 crore, for a net loss of roughly ₹32.6 to ₹33.2 crore, according to Inc42’s reading of its MCA filings. Its loss as a share of revenue has been narrowing.

What is Signzy’s valuation?

Signzy has not officially disclosed a valuation since its Series B. Third-party trackers have estimated it at roughly $134.6 million (getlatka) to $150 million (CB Insights, a 2022 reference); these are external estimates the company has not confirmed.

Sources

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

• Inc42, Signzy company and financials profile, 2026
• Entrackr, “Signzy raises $26 Mn from Gaja Capital and existing backers,” September 2022
• Entrackr, “Mastercard and Arkam Ventures join Signzy’s Series A round,” October 2020
• Signzy company blog, “Signzy raises Rs 210 crore led by Gaja Capital,” 2022
• FinTech Futures, “India’s Signzy raises $26m in Series B funding round,” 2022
• Forbes India, “30 Under 30: Why Signzy is digital banking’s final frontier,” 2017
• ZaubaCorp and Tofler, Signzy Technologies Private Limited MCA profile (CIN U74999MH2015PTC404635), accessed September 2026
• Tracxn and Dealroom, Signzy funding and company profiles, 2025-2026
• getlatka and CB Insights, Signzy revenue and valuation estimates, 2025-2026
• Trading Economics, USD/INR reference rate, 18 September 2026

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