Startup Deep Dive : Simpl – it called itself profitable six days after RBI shut its core business

Simpl spent nine years telling merchants it was building “trust, one transaction at a time” across a network of more than 26,000 partners, from Zomato to BigBasket to MakeMyTrip. On 25 September 2025, the Reserve Bank of India ordered it to stop moving money altogether, ruling that the company had been running a payment system without the licence the law requires. Six days later, while cutting most of its remaining staff, the same company told employees it was “already profitable” — a claim that sits awkwardly next to its own last public numbers, an audited loss of Rs 144.28 crore on revenue of Rs 31.63 crore in FY22.

Simpl, legally One Sigma Technologies Private Limited, built a “buy now, pay later” checkout button that let shoppers settle purchases within 15 days at no interest, embedded inside merchant apps rather than sold as its own destination site. Founded in Bengaluru in 2015 by Nityanand Sharma and Chaitra Chidanand, it raised $83 million across four rounds, survived three separate rounds of layoffs, fought off a co-founder’s lawsuit, and built a network Business Standard and Medianama both put at over 26,000 merchants — only to run into two regulators in the same 12 months: the Enforcement Directorate, which filed a Rs 913.76 crore ($95.2 million at $1≈₹96.0, 18 September 2026, Trading Economics) FEMA complaint in July 2025, and the RBI, which shut its core business down two months later.

Quick facts

What Simpl does

Simpl sells a pay-later checkout instrument, not a standalone app people shop on. A consumer buys something on a partner’s site or app — a Zomato order, a BigBasket grocery run, a Rapido ride, a MakeMyTrip booking — and instead of paying instantly by card or UPI, taps “Simpl” and settles the bill later, usually within a 15-day cycle, at no stated interest. The company markets it as a digital version of a shopkeeper’s khata, a running tab that gets squared up periodically. Its customers are effectively two-sided: shoppers who want a frictionless checkout, and the merchants who embed Simpl’s button to reduce cart abandonment and repeat-purchase friction. Medianama and Business Standard both put its live merchant network above 26,000 partners as of 2025, spanning food delivery, e-pharmacy, quick commerce, ride-hailing, travel and furniture rental.

The origin

The idea came from the founders’ own frustration with India’s credit and banking plumbing after they moved back from the United States. Chaitra Chidanand, a Stanford graduate who had worked in Silicon Valley, returned to India in 2014 and could not get a credit card because of an address-proof mismatch; opening a bank account and getting a debit card took her eight weeks, according to an account in the Wharton FinTech blog. Nitya Sharma had spent years on Wall Street — at Bear Stearns on mortgage-backed securities from 2004, then at Goldman Sachs as a vice president trading collateralised debt obligations and credit correlation — and hit a similar wall when his own credit card application was declined on returning home. That gap between what global finance could do and what an ordinary returning professional could access became the founding insight: build a credit instrument that plugged directly into a merchant’s checkout, using statistical credit-risk models rather than the paperwork-heavy, collateral-driven approach of Indian banks and NBFCs. Sharma and Chidanand launched Simpl in March 2016, positioning it as infrastructure merchants could embed rather than a consumer app people would need to be marketed into using separately.

The struggle years

Simpl’s growth in its first five years came with a widening loss problem, and by 2021 that came to a head. By June 2021 the company was processing more than $140 million in annualised payment volume with close to 490,000 monthly users, according to The Morning Context — but the same report described a business “bleeding” and heavy losses that had depleted its capital. That year the founders restructured the company’s holding structure, moving to a Delaware-incorporated parent, Simpl Inc., with a new Indian operating entity, Xeropay Technologies. Chaitra Chidanand contested the restructuring in court that November, in a dispute The Morning Context reported centred on employee ESOPs and the terms of her own exit — a co-founder suing the company she had built was the first hard evidence that Simpl’s early years had not been as clean as its funding announcements suggested.

The financial strain did not end with the restructuring. In April 2023, Simpl laid off more than 150 employees — over a quarter of its workforce — telling staff it was “re-looking at” headcount to become “leaner and agile” for a harder funding environment, per Entrackr. That round followed the RBI’s own 2022 clampdown on the wider BNPL industry, which barred non-bank lenders from loading borrowed money onto prepaid instruments and forced several players to rework their products. A second, larger round of cuts came in May 2024, when Simpl cut a further 160 to 170 positions, concentrated in higher-cost engineering and product roles. Across those two rounds the company shed more than 300 people in just over a year — a pattern of retrenchment that predates, and foreshadows, the far more serious regulatory crisis to come.

The turning point

The event that actually broke Simpl’s business model arrived in two blows five weeks apart. On 24 July 2025, the Enforcement Directorate filed a formal complaint under the Foreign Exchange Management Act against One Sigma Technologies, alleging Rs 913.76 crore in violations — Rs 648.87 crore received as foreign direct investment and a further Rs 264.88 crore raised through convertible notes, both routed through the 100% automatic FDI approval route available to “information technology and computer service” companies. The ED’s case, per Entrackr and Medianama, was that Simpl’s real business was financial services, which requires prior government clearance rather than automatic approval, and that classifying itself as an IT company let it sidestep that scrutiny for years. The complaint, naming the company and director Nithya Nand Sharma, was referred to FEMA’s adjudicating authority under Section 13.

Then, on 25 September 2025, the RBI directed Simpl to “immediately stop the business of payment systems carried out by involving functions of payment, clearing, and settlement,” finding it had been operating a payment system without the mandatory Certificate of Authorisation under the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007 — the same law that governs licensed payment aggregators and wallets. The numbers on either side of that one order are stark: before it, Simpl employed roughly 220 people servicing a live network of 26,000-plus merchants; six days later, on 1 October 2025, it laid off between 80 (Inc42) and 100 (PeopleMatters, Moneycontrol) employees, leaving a skeleton team of 50 to 60 focused only on collections and winding down existing balances. CEO Nitya Sharma told staff the company had “a healthy runway and are already profitable,” and pledged to bring people back once the RBI granted authorisation. As of this session in September 2026, no published report has confirmed that authorisation was granted, and the company’s own consumer-facing website, getsimpl.com, currently resolves to a generic Namecheap hosting parking page rather than a live product — checked directly on 25 September 2026.

The money behind it

• Total raised: $83 million across four rounds, per Tracxn, Inc42, Medianama and PeopleMatters (consistent across independent trackers).
• Seed round: $2.66 million, 30 November 2016, led by Green Visor Capital and Graph Ventures (Tracxn).
• Series A: $2.60 million, 17 August 2017, led by IA Ventures with more than 20 other participants (Tracxn).
• Series B: $40 million, closed and announced December 2021, led by Valar Ventures and IA Ventures, with participation from LFH Ventures and The Fintech Fund (Entrackr, CB Insights) — this remains Simpl’s last disclosed funding round.
• Other named backers across its cap table include DIA Investments, Hard Yaka and FJ Labs, per BusinessToday’s reporting on the RBI order.
• Post-Series B valuation: not disclosed; Tracxn lists the figure as redacted, and no other tracker checked this session published a number, so it is left out rather than estimated.

How it makes money

• Merchant fees: Simpl earns primarily from fees charged to the merchants whose checkout it powers, in exchange for absorbing repayment risk and driving conversion — the standard BNPL merchant-discount model, as described in coverage of the RBI action (myfintax.in).
• Consumer side: no compounding interest is charged to shoppers; instead, a flat late fee applies if a bill is not settled within the stated cycle, rather than accruing interest the way a credit card would.
• Funding of credit: the company has said publicly that it lends using its own capital and collateral rather than public deposits, meaning a bad debt loss sits on Simpl’s own balance sheet rather than a bank’s or depositor’s.
• What is not published: Simpl has never disclosed its merchant discount rate or take rate, its gross transaction/payment volume in recent years, or a breakdown of revenue between fee income and late-fee income — each of these was searched for this session and cut from the piece as unverifiable rather than estimated.

The numbers

Both years come from One Sigma Technologies’ RoC filing as reported by Entrackr in April 2023 — revenue grew roughly 17x year-on-year in FY22 while losses grew about 22.5x over the same base. No FY23, FY24 or FY25 filing for One Sigma Technologies turned up in any tracker checked this session (Entrackr, Tracxn, Tofler and Zaubacorp were all searched); Tracxn’s own dashboard separately bins the company’s revenue “as of 31 March 2024” into a broad Rs 100-500 crore range without a precise figure, which is too wide a band to responsibly present as a data point, so it has been left out rather than padded in. That absence of a recent, precise, audited number is itself the reason CEO Sharma’s October 2025 claim of being “already profitable” cannot be independently verified — it is a company statement, not a filed result.

Where the money comes from

• Food delivery and food-tech: Zomato, Box8 — high-frequency, low-ticket transactions that Simpl has cited as core use cases since launch.
• Quick commerce and grocery: BigBasket — repeat, habitual purchases suited to a running-tab model.
• Mobility: Rapido, Quick Ride — smaller-ticket, high-frequency rides.
• Travel: MakeMyTrip — higher-ticket, lower-frequency bookings.
• Healthcare and pharmacy: 1mg — recurring, needs-based purchases.
• Other categories: Furlenco (furniture rental) and Dunzo/Grofers-era hyperlocal delivery in earlier merchant lists (Entrackr, 2023).
• Geography: India only; no international market or revenue split has been disclosed in any source checked.
• The surprise: despite spreading itself across a genuinely diverse set of consumption categories rather than depending on one vertical, the business ultimately failed not on demand or merchant adoption but on how it classified and licensed the underlying money movement — the same “trust” infrastructure pitch to merchants turned out to be exactly the activity, payment clearing and settlement, that regulators said it had never been authorised to run.

The risks

• Licensing risk (realised): the RBI’s 25 September 2025 order requires Simpl to obtain a Certificate of Authorisation under the PSS Act before it can resume payment, clearing or settlement activity — an approval with no public timeline, and one the company still did not appear to hold as of this session.
• FDI/FEMA compliance risk (realised): the ED’s Rs 913.76 crore complaint, alleging Simpl misclassified itself as an IT company to raise foreign capital through the automatic route rather than the government route required of financial-services businesses, is now with FEMA’s adjudicating authority under Section 13 and could carry monetary penalties tied to the amount involved.
• Workforce and execution risk: three rounds of layoffs in three years (April 2023, May 2024, October 2025) have cut headcount from roughly 220 to a reported 50–60, concentrated in collections rather than growth functions — a company this thin cannot easily restart merchant integrations or product development even if authorisation is eventually granted.
• Sector-wide credit risk: the RBI’s broader objection to unsecured BNPL lending — inadequate repayment-capacity checks and weak consumer-protection safeguards, cited in its 2022 restrictions and again in 2025 — applies to the category Simpl operates in generally, not to Simpl alone, and shapes how any relaunched product will have to be underwritten.

The takeaway

Simpl’s nine years show that a genuinely useful product and a genuinely broken compliance foundation can coexist for a long time before the second one catches up with the first. Merchants adopted the checkout button, transaction volumes grew from under $2 crore of revenue in FY21 to over $30 crore a year later, and the company survived a co-founder’s lawsuit and two rounds of belt-tightening — all while, per the ED’s telling, it was raising foreign capital under a business classification regulators say it did not actually qualify for. The lesson is not that BNPL as a category is unworkable; PhonePe, Amazon Pay Later and others in adjacent categories have not faced the same order. It is that for a regulated financial business, the licence and the classification are not paperwork to be optimised around — they are the product, in the same way the underlying credit model is. A startup can out-execute its competitors on merchant integrations and still be shut down in a single order because the entity behind the button was never authorised to move the money it was moving.

Frequently asked questions

What does Simpl actually sell?

A pay-later checkout instrument embedded inside merchant apps and websites — shoppers buy now and settle the bill within roughly 15 days at no stated interest, while Simpl earns from fees charged to the merchant and flat late fees on missed consumer payments.

Who founded Simpl, and when?

Nityanand “Nitya” Sharma and Chaitra Chidanand founded the company, registered as One Sigma Technologies Private Limited, in 2015 in Bengaluru, and launched the Simpl product in March 2016.

Why did the RBI order Simpl to stop operating?

On 25 September 2025, the RBI found that Simpl had been running a payment system — handling payment, clearing and settlement functions — without the Certificate of Authorisation required under the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007, and ordered it to stop immediately.

How much funding has Simpl raised, and is it profitable?

Simpl has raised $83 million across four rounds since 2016, most recently a $40 million Series B in December 2021 led by Valar Ventures and IA Ventures. Its last audited result, FY22, showed a Rs 144.28 crore loss; a company statement in October 2025 claimed it was “already profitable,” but no audited filing confirming that has been found in public record.

Is Simpl still operating as of September 2026?

Partially, at most. The company retained a skeleton team of 50–60 employees after October 2025 layoffs, focused on collections rather than new business, and no public report reviewed this month confirms it has regained RBI authorisation to resume its core payments business; its own website currently redirects to a generic hosting parking page.

Sources

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

• Entrackr, “BNPL firm Simpl under ED lens for Rs 913 Cr FDI violations,” July 2025
• Entrackr, “Exclusive: BNPL startup Simpl layoffs over 150 employees,” April 2023
• Entrackr, “Simpl bags $40 Mn in Series B round,” December 2021
• Medianama, “RBI Asks Simpl To Halt Payments Business Over PSS Act Violation,” September 2025
• Medianama, “Fintech Platform Simpl Under ED Lens For Rs 913 Cr Foreign Funding,” July 2025
• YourStory, “Fintech SIMPL under ED scanner for alleged Rs 900 Cr FEMA breach,” July 2025
• PeopleMatters, “BNPL startup Simpl cuts 100 jobs after RBI order halts operations,” October 2025
• Inc42, “BNPL Startup Simpl Lays Off 80 Employees After RBI Whiplash,” October 2025
• BusinessToday, “RBI orders BNPL startup Simpl to halt payment operations over regulatory breach,” September 2025
• myfintax.in, “RBI Cracks Down on Simpl: What It Means for You,” September 2025
• Tracxn, Simpl company profile (funding rounds, employee count, revenue band, valuation status), accessed September 2026
• The Morning Context, “Simpl co-founder drags fintech startup to court,” November 2021
• Wharton FinTech (Medium), “Simplifying India’s Payments with Nitya Sharma, CEO & Co-Founder of Simpl,” interview account of founding story
• InsightsSuccess, “Nityanand Sharma, CEO & Co-founder, Simpl Technologies Private Limited,” founder background
• getsimpl.com, direct check of live site status, 25 September 2026

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