Startup Deep Dive : SmartCoin – how a small-ticket lender to underserved India turned profitable and raised Rs 207 crore

A lending app that spent seven years handing out loans as small as a few thousand rupees turned its first annual profit in the year to March 2024, and then, in the year to March 2025, grew revenue 36% to Rs 338 crore (about $35 million at Rs 96.0 to the dollar) while more than doubling net profit to Rs 26 crore, according to regulatory filings reported by Entrackr in February 2026. The contradiction sits in plain sight: it built that profit by lending mostly to the customers India’s banks have spent decades avoiding.

The company is SmartCoin, the Bengaluru fintech that rebranded to Olyv in January 2024. It is one of the few small-ticket digital lenders in India to have survived the sector’s 2022-23 clean-up, halved its own revenue in the process, rebuilt as a multi-product platform, and then raised fresh money at a higher valuation. This is how a business built on thin-file borrowers found a margin, and where that margin is still exposed.

Quick facts

What SmartCoin does

SmartCoin, now Olyv, runs a mobile lending app that gives small, short-tenure personal loans to people with little or no formal credit history: self-employed workers, micro-merchants and salaried staff in the lower and middle income bands. The pitch, in Rohit Garg’s own words to Inc42 around its 2020 Series A, is that “other financial services institutions choose to ignore the segment because of the lack of formal financial and credit histories.” The app underwrites those borrowers using alternative data such as phone and transaction signals rather than a thick bureau file, and offers instant loans that historically started in the low thousands of rupees and now run up to Rs 5 lakh (company-stated, moneymint). Since the 2024 rebrand, it has wrapped two more products around the loan: a credit-health tracker and digital gold savings, repositioning from a single-product loan app into what it calls a financial-wellness platform.

The origin

SmartCoin was founded in January 2016 in Bengaluru by four engineers who had each built systems at scale. As reported by moneymint, Rohit Garg studied at IIT Kanpur and IIM Ahmedabad; Amit Chandel came from IIT Bombay and the University of Toronto; Vinay Kumar Singh trained at IIT Bombay; and Jayant Upadhyay at IIT Delhi. The founding question was narrow and unglamorous: why do so many working Indians who repay reliably still get shut out of formal credit?

The answer they built around was data. A bank asks for a salary slip and a bureau score; a large share of India’s workforce has neither. SmartCoin’s early bet, described in a 2018 Business Standard profile and YourStory’s coverage of its first institutional round, was that a smartphone throws off enough signal to price a small loan for someone with a thin file. It started as a lender of last resort for amounts most banks would not bother to process, and leaned on its own non-banking finance company licence plus partner balance sheets to actually put money out. The early traction was in volume, not size: the company said it had disbursed over 50,000 micro loans by early 2018 and more than 300,000 loans in 18 months by September 2019 (YourStory).

The struggle years

SmartCoin’s first hard problem was capital. By 2019 it had raised only about $2.5 million in total, per YourStory, a thin cushion for a business that has to fund or arrange every rupee it lends. It stitched together a seed round from Unicorn India Ventures and ISME Ace in April 2017, a $2 million pre-Series A in March 2018 led by Accion Venture Lab with an undisclosed Chinese venture fund, and only reached a proper Series A of about $7 million (Rs 52 crore) in March 2020, led by LGT Lightstone Aspada.

The second, deeper setback was the sector-wide reckoning that followed. India’s instant-loan boom of 2019-21 produced a wave of predatory and often illegal lending apps, many with opaque foreign links, and regulators responded. The Reserve Bank of India’s digital-lending guidelines, issued in 2022, forced every app to prove it was lending through a regulated entity, to route money directly between borrower and lender, and to disclose its true cost of credit. For a company that had taken early money from a Chinese fund and operated in exactly the small-ticket space under scrutiny, the tightening was existential. The financial dent is visible in the numbers of its lending entity: revenue at Smartcoin Financials fell 49.9% year-on-year, from Rs 48.9 crore in FY22 to Rs 24.5 crore in FY23, as reported by Inc42. A company that had spent years chasing growth suddenly had to shrink, prove its compliance, and find a second act.

The turning point

The second act was the rebrand and the pivot behind it. In January 2024 SmartCoin unveiled the Olyv brand and, with it, a wider product set: alongside loans, it added credit-health tracking and digital gold savings, moving from a pure lender to a broader money app. The strategic point was not the name. It was that a single-product loan app in a regulated, capital-hungry business needed more ways to earn from each user, and more reasons for users to stay.

The numbers on either side of that shift tell the story. On one side sat a lending entity whose revenue had just halved to Rs 24.5 crore in FY23. On the other, the consolidated business reported its first profitable year in FY24 with revenue of about Rs 249 crore and what the company described as 76% growth in business volumes, then followed it in FY25 with revenue of Rs 338 crore, up 36% year-on-year, and net profit of Rs 26 crore, more than double the previous year (Entrackr, from RoC filings). By its own account the platform was serving 26 lakh monthly active users in FY24, up 80% year-on-year, drawn from a cumulative base of more than 3 crore registered users (company-stated, CXOToday, January 2024). The company that markets said was finished had instead become one of the sector’s clean survivors.

The money behind it

SmartCoin’s funding history reads as a slow, difficult equity story bolstered by debt lines needed to actually lend. The rounds, as reported:

• Seed, April 2017: undisclosed amount from Unicorn India Ventures and ISME Ace (YourStory, March 2018).
• Pre-Series A, March 2018: $2 million led by Accion Venture Lab with an undisclosed Chinese venture fund (YourStory / Inc42, March 2018).
• Series A, March 2020: about $7 million (Rs 52 crore) led by LGT Lightstone Aspada, with Unicorn India Ventures and Accion Venture Lab following on (YourStory, March 2020).
• Debt: Rs 80 crore raised in debt funding from Northern Arc and others to fund the loan book (Inc42).
• Series C, reported February 2026: Rs 207 crore (around $23 million) led by The Fundamentum Partnership at Rs 120 crore, with SMBC Asia Rising Fund putting in Rs 87.5 crore (Entrackr, from RoC filings).

The named backers each brought something specific:

• The Fundamentum Partnership (the growth fund co-founded by Nandan Nilekani) led the latest round with Rs 120 crore and now holds 11.48%, a validation signal for a business rebuilding after the lending reset (Entrackr, RoC filings).
• SMBC Asia Rising Fund, the venture arm of Japan’s Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, contributed Rs 87.5 crore and holds 8.37%, giving Olyv a large bank-group backer (Entrackr, RoC filings).
• Lightrock (formerly LGT Lightstone), which led the 2020 Series A, remains the single largest shareholder at 22.43% (Entrackr, RoC filings).
• Accion Venture Lab and Unicorn India Ventures were the early believers, backing the pre-Series A and follow-on rounds before the business had scale.

On totals, accounts differ and are worth naming: the company has described roughly $25 million in equity plus about $80 million in debt raised to date (company-stated, moneymint), while startup database Tracxn records around $49.5 million across nine rounds. After the Series C the business was valued at about Rs 1,045 crore post-money, roughly $109 million at Rs 96.0 to the dollar (Entrackr, RoC filings; corroborated by Entrepreneur India).

How it makes money

Olyv’s model is a digital-lending stack layered on regulated balance sheets. The mechanics, as disclosed:

• Sourcing and servicing: Olyv operates the app as a Loan Service Provider and handles “sourcing, processing and collection of documents and KYC,” plus monitoring, collections and customer support, as set out on Poonawalla Fincorp’s digital-partnership disclosure page.
• Two ways to fund a loan: it lends off its own NBFC, Smartcoin Financials Private Limited, and it arranges credit through partner lenders such as Poonawalla Fincorp, earning on the loans it sources and services for them.
• Where the margin sits: net interest earned on loans held on its own book, plus fees and a share of interest on loans sourced for partners, less the cost of borrowed funds, customer acquisition and, critically, credit losses on an unsecured, thin-file book.
• Underwriting is the moat: approvals lean on alternative-data credit models rather than bureau scores, which is what lets it price borrowers banks reject; get the models wrong and the losses land straight on the margin.
• The part people get wrong: a lending app is not a software business with software margins. Every rupee lent must first be funded, and the real profit lever is not app downloads but the spread between the yield on small loans and the all-in cost of capital plus defaults.

The numbers

The table below sets out revenue and profit across four years. An important caveat: the FY22 and FY23 figures are for the standalone lending entity as reported by Inc42, while the FY24 and FY25 figures are the consolidated group numbers reported by Entrackr from RoC filings, so the two pairs are on a different reporting basis and are not a clean like-for-like series across the break. All figures are in Rs crore.

Two things stand out. First, the standalone lending entity genuinely contracted during the 2022-23 reset, so the recovery is not a smooth line but a shrink-then-rebuild. Second, once the platform found profitability in FY24 it compounded quickly: 36% revenue growth and a doubling of profit in FY25 is the kind of operating leverage that a lending business only shows when its credit costs are under control.

Where the money comes from

Olyv is a domestic, mass-market Indian lender, so the split that matters is by product and by who it serves rather than by geography. The disclosed picture:

• Core product: small-ticket unsecured personal loans remain the engine, with credit-health tracking and digital gold savings added since the 2024 rebrand as engagement and cross-sell layers (company-stated).
• Customer base: more than 3 crore cumulative registered users and 26 lakh monthly active users in FY24, up 80% year-on-year (company-stated, CXOToday, January 2024).
• Reach: lending across 19,000-plus pin codes, deliberately including smaller towns that formal lenders under-serve (company-stated).
• The surprise: nearly 75% of customers are repeat borrowers (company-stated, moneymint). For a lender to the underserved, that retention is the quiet asset. A borrower who comes back is cheaper to acquire, better understood by the credit model, and more profitable per loan, which is a large part of why the margin turned.
• Scale so far: more than 6 million loans disbursed by 2022, against a loan book of about Rs 400 crore disbursed to date at the time of its 2020 Series A (Inc42), and a stated ambition to reach $1 billion in assets under management over three years.

The risks

The risks are the structural ones of unsecured small-ticket lending, and they are concrete:

• Credit risk on thin-file borrowers: the whole model rests on pricing people the bureau cannot. If the alternative-data models drift or a downturn hits informal incomes, defaults rise directly against a slim spread. The FY23 revenue halving of the standalone entity is a reminder of how fast this book can turn.
• Regulatory tightening: the RBI’s 2022 digital-lending guidelines already reshaped the sector, and rules on first-loss default guarantees and small-ticket unsecured credit continue to evolve. Each tightening raises compliance cost and can cap growth in exactly Olyv’s segment.
• Funding dependence: because it lends partly off partner balance sheets and borrowed lines (such as the Rs 80 crore of debt from Northern Arc and others), its growth is hostage to the willingness of banks, NBFCs and debt investors to keep funding small unsecured loans, appetite that shrinks quickly when the credit cycle turns.
• Competition: the small-ticket digital-lending space is crowded with well-funded rivals, and the borrower’s loyalty is thin when a cheaper or faster loan is one app-install away.

The takeaway

The transferable lesson from SmartCoin is that in lending, surviving a clean-up can be worth more than winning a boom. Plenty of instant-loan apps grew faster in 2019-21 and are now gone; SmartCoin let its own revenue halve, absorbed the new rules, rebuilt as a multi-product platform under the Olyv name, and came out the other side profitable and able to raise Rs 207 crore at a higher valuation. The deeper point is that the underserved borrower, so often described as too risky to serve, turned out to be a durable customer once the underwriting worked and nearly three in four came back. The margin was never in the marketing or the app store rating. It was in getting the credit model right, keeping funding cheap, and being one of the businesses still standing when the regulator finished cleaning house.

Frequently asked questions

Is SmartCoin the same company as Olyv?

Yes. SmartCoin, founded in Bengaluru in January 2016, rebranded to Olyv in January 2024 as it expanded from a pure loan app into a platform that also offers credit-health tracking and digital gold savings. The legal entity behind the app is Smartcoin Financials Private Limited.

Who founded SmartCoin and who runs it?

It was founded by Rohit Garg, Amit Chandel, Vinay Kumar Singh and Jayant Upadhyay, all engineers from the IITs, with Garg (IIT Kanpur and IIM Ahmedabad) serving as chief executive.

How much money has SmartCoin raised?

Rounds reported include a 2018 pre-Series A of $2 million, a 2020 Series A of about $7 million led by LGT Lightstone Aspada, Rs 80 crore of debt, and a Series C of Rs 207 crore (around $23 million) reported in February 2026 led by The Fundamentum Partnership with SMBC Asia Rising Fund. Totals differ by source: the company has cited roughly $25 million in equity plus about $80 million in debt, while Tracxn records about $49.5 million across nine rounds.

Is SmartCoin profitable?

Yes, as of its latest disclosures. It reported its first profitable year in FY24 and, in FY25, revenue of Rs 338 crore (up 36% year-on-year) with net profit of Rs 26 crore, more than double the prior year, according to RoC filings reported by Entrackr.

What is SmartCoin worth?

After the Series C reported in February 2026, the company was valued at about Rs 1,045 crore post-money, roughly $109 million at Rs 96.0 to the dollar, per regulatory filings reported by Entrackr and corroborated by Entrepreneur India. It is a private company and is not listed.

Sources

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

• Entrackr — “Nandan Nilekani’s Fundamentum leads Olyv’s $23 Mn Series C round” (Series C amount, investors, valuation, shareholding, FY24 and FY25 revenue and profit), February 2026.
• Inc42 — SmartCoin company and funding profile (founding, founders, FY22 and FY23 standalone revenue, funding rounds, debt, disbursals), 2026.
• Inc42 — “SmartCoin Secures $7 Mn Funding” and Series A coverage (Series A lead LGT Lightstone Aspada, Rs 400 crore disbursed, Garg quote), March 2020.
• YourStory — “SmartCoin raises $2M pre-Series A” and “micro-lending startup raises over $7M in Series A” (seed and pre-Series A investors, loan counts, Series A), March 2018 and March 2020.
• CXOToday — “Olyv reports profitable FY24, clocks over INR 250 cr in revenue” (FY24 revenue, 76% business-volume growth, 26 lakh MAU up 80%, 3 crore users, Garg quote), January 2024.
• moneymint — “How four founders’ Olyv clocked Rs 250 crore revenue” (founder backgrounds, product set, repeat-customer rate, users, pin codes, loans disbursed, equity and debt totals), 2024.
• Entrepreneur India — “Olyv secures USD 23 Mn Series B/C funding led by Fundamentum” (round, SMBC participation, Rs 1,045 crore post-money valuation), 2026.
• Poonawalla Fincorp — digital-partnership disclosure page for SmartCoin / Olyv (Loan Service Provider role, sourcing and servicing responsibilities), 2026.
• bestmediainfo / Campaign India — coverage of the SmartCoin-to-Olyv rebrand and campaign (rebrand timing, product expansion, 20 million users, 19,000+ pin codes over the SmartCoin run), January 2024.
• Tracxn — Olyv / Smartcoin Financials Private Limited company profile (total funding across rounds, employee count), 2026.
• Trading Economics — USD/INR reference rate, 18 September 2026.

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