Snapmint lends money to millions of Indians who do not own a credit card, tells them the loan carries zero interest, and still booked its first-ever annual profit in the year to March 2025. Revenue climbed about 79% to ₹158.5 crore (about $16.5 million) in FY25, while the bottom line swung from a ₹33.6 crore loss the year before to a ₹15 crore net profit, as per financial statements filed with the Registrar of Companies and reported by Entrackr.
That contradiction — a “no-cost EMI” business that makes money by not charging the borrower — is the whole story of how a company built by three IIT Bombay engineers went from a term sheet that evaporated during the 2020 lockdown to a $125 million Series B led by General Atlantic in October 2025. This deep dive walks through where the money actually comes from, the near-death moments the founders rarely soften, and the risks that sit under the ₹1.5 crore of net margin on every ₹100 crore of business.
Quick facts
| Company | Snapmint (operating entity: Snapmint Credit Advisory Private Limited, CIN U72200MH2017PTC300126; lending arm: Snapmint Financial Services Private Limited, an RBI-registered NBFC) |
| Founded | Operating entity incorporated 26 September 2017, Mumbai (idea traced to a 2016 advertising insight) |
| Founder(s) | Nalin Agrawal (CEO), Anil Gelra, Abhineet Sawa — all IIT Bombay alumni |
| Businesses | No-cost / no-credit-card EMI (buy now, pay later) at online and offline checkout, funded through its own NBFC |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹158.5 crore (FY25), up ~79% from ₹88.5 crore in FY24 (Entrackr, citing RoC filings) |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Net profit ₹15 crore in FY25, versus a net loss of ₹33.6 crore in FY24 (first profitable year) |
| Listed | Private (not listed) |
| Market value / last valuation | Not disclosed; raised $125 million Series B in October 2025 (General Atlantic took an 18.8% stake) |
| Key shareholders / CEO | CEO Nalin Agrawal; backers include General Atlantic, Prudent Investment Managers, Kae Capital, Elev8 Venture Partners |
What Snapmint does
Snapmint lets a shopper split a purchase into monthly instalments at checkout without owning a credit card. The pitch to the consumer is stark: 0% interest, 0% processing fee, 0% late fee on its no-cost EMI plans, with sign-up needing only a PAN and a UPI auto-debit mandate rather than a card or a long approval process. It serves both online merchants and offline stores across categories including electronics, mobile phones, appliances, fashion, travel, home and lifestyle. Key operating markers, as of FY25:
- 7 million monthly active users across 23,000 pincodes (company-stated, via Entrackr, October 2025).
- About 1.5 million purchases financed every month (company-stated, October 2025).
- Lending done through its own RBI-registered NBFC, Snapmint Financial Services Private Limited, which received its NBFC licence in 2019.
- Positioned at the “credit-thin” majority — tier-2 and tier-3 shoppers who want to buy now but have never held a credit card.
The origin: an ad campaign that converted nobody
The founding insight was an accident of advertising. In 2016, Nalin Agrawal, Anil Gelra and Abhineet Sawa — three IIT Bombay engineers who had already built a patent-analytics firm later acquired by Netscribes and payment systems for Yes Bank — were running a programmatic advertising business. An e-commerce client asked them to promote a new credit-card EMI option at checkout. The campaign was, on one metric, a runaway success: it lifted visits to the payment page by 80% to 120%, against the 8% to 9% lift a normal campaign delivered.
Then almost nobody bought. Curious about the gap, the founders ran geo-analytics on who was clicking. The answer reframed the whole opportunity: the people most desperate to pay in instalments were sitting in tier-2 cities and did not own the credit card the offer required. Demand for “buy now, pay later” was enormous; the instrument to serve it did not exist for most of the country. Snapmint’s operating entity, Snapmint Credit Advisory Private Limited, was incorporated on 26 September 2017 to close that gap — instalments for the roughly 90%-plus of Indian adults with no credit card, funded not through a card network but through the company’s own lending book.
The struggle years
Snapmint’s early years were a sequence of near-misses that the founders describe plainly. Two dates matter most.
The first was March 2020. The company had signed a Series A term sheet worth roughly $5 million on 19 March 2020. Five days later, on 24 March 2020, India announced its nationwide COVID-19 lockdown, retail collapsed, and the term sheet evaporated. A lending business with no fresh capital and a book of borrowers heading into an income shock is close to the definition of an existential moment. Credit losses on the pandemic-era cohort eventually settled around 4.8% — survivable, but far above where the business needed them to be.
The rescue came from an individual, not a fund. Prashasta Seth — who would later become managing director at Prudent Investment Managers — put in about $1 million to keep the company alive through 2020. Even after that lifeline, the numbers were tiny: when Seth led a larger round in 2021, Snapmint’s annual revenue was only around ₹4 crore. The gap between that ₹4 crore and the ₹158.5 crore of FY25 is the distance the company had to travel, and for several years it travelled it while losing money — a ₹32.98 crore net loss in FY23 and a ₹33.6 crore net loss in FY24.
The turning point: the year it made money
The single turning point is the FY25 profit-and-loss swing, because it is what unlocked the company’s largest-ever raise. Put the two years side by side:
- FY24: revenue ₹88.5 crore, net loss ₹33.6 crore.
- FY25: revenue ₹158.5 crore (up about 79%), net profit ₹15 crore.
In one year Snapmint added roughly ₹70 crore of revenue and closed a ₹48 crore gap on the bottom line — moving from a third-consecutive-year loss to its first profit. That combination, growth plus a demonstrated path to profitability in a segment where many lenders bleed, is exactly what a late-stage investor pays for. Weeks after the FY25 numbers were reported in mid-2025, Snapmint closed a $125 million Series B led by General Atlantic in October 2025, one of the larger consumer-finance rounds of the year in India. The near-death of March 2020 and the marquee round of October 2025 sit at opposite ends of the same five-year arc.
The money behind it
Snapmint’s cap table has been built round by round, often with the same names returning. The documented funding shape:
- Seed stage: Kae Capital backed the company from its seed round and has stayed in through every subsequent round, including Series B (reported by Kae Capital and Entrackr).
- 2020 bridge: about $1 million from Prashasta Seth after the original Series A term sheet collapsed (FounderThesis).
- Series A (2022): $9 million raised in March 2022, topped up to about $21 million in equity and debt by October 2022; led by Prashasta Seth, with participation from Kae Capital, 9Unicorns, Anicut Capital and Negen Capital (Entrackr).
- Pre-Series B (December 2024): about $18 million in a mix of debt and equity (Entrackr, via TheKredible).
- Series B (October 2025): $125 million led by General Atlantic — $115 million primary and about $10 million secondary — with Prudent Investment Managers, Kae Capital, Elev8 Venture Partners and existing angels. General Atlantic took an 18.8% stake; the valuation was not disclosed (Entrackr, Kae Capital).
What each backer changed is instructive. Prashasta Seth’s cheque was survival capital that also brought a lending-industry operator onto the register; Prudent Investment Managers gave the loan book institutional funding; General Atlantic’s $125 million is scale capital, earmarked for expanding the merchant network and building UPI-based pre-approved credit lines with partner banks. On the total raised, sources differ by how they count debt and secondary sales: Entrackr puts it at roughly $140 million to date, while data platforms Inc42 and Tracxn list higher cumulative figures of about $172.9 million and $181 million respectively. The valuation attached to the Series B has not been officially disclosed, so this piece does not assign one.
How it makes money
The part people get wrong is assuming a “zero interest” lender must lose money on financing. Snapmint does not earn primarily from the borrower — it earns from the merchant and from its own lending spread. The mechanics, drawn from the founder’s own account and RoC filings:
- Merchant subvention: merchants pay Snapmint a commission of roughly 3.5% to 10% of the sale value, depending on category and instalment tenure. The merchant absorbs the financing cost in exchange for a higher conversion rate and larger basket sizes; the shopper sees “no cost.”
- Interest and allied income: per the RoC filings, interest income from lending is the primary reported revenue line, with commissions, subvention, partner discounts and processing fees making up the rest (Entrackr).
- Unit economics: on a typical six-month transaction at about a 7.5% merchant commission, roughly 2.5 percentage points cover credit losses and about 3 points cover the cost of capital, leaving a net margin of around 1.5% (founder-stated, FounderThesis).
- The moat is underwriting: the company reports a credit-loss rate under 2.5%, against a 6% to 8% industry benchmark, using a model that weighs roughly 3,000 variables and 180 to 200 real-time data points, with fraud decisions in 5 to 10 minutes (founder-stated).
In short, the margin sits in the gap between a sub-2.5% loss rate and the merchant subvention — a spread that only works if the underwriting is genuinely better than the market’s.
The numbers
Three years of results, from RoC filings as reported by Entrackr and TheKredible. Figures are for the flagship operating entity, Snapmint Credit Advisory Private Limited, in ₹ crore.
| Financial year | Revenue from operations (₹ crore) | Net profit / (loss) (₹ crore) |
| FY23 | 79.75 | (32.98) |
| FY24 | 88.5 | (33.6) |
| FY25 | 158.5 | 15.0 |
The pattern is a business that grew slowly and stayed loss-making through FY23 and FY24, then jumped in FY25 on both lines at once — revenue up about 79% and the loss flipping to profit. One caveat on precision: data platform Inc42 lists slightly different FY25 and FY24 revenue (about ₹152.3 crore and ₹89 crore); this piece uses Entrackr’s RoC-based ₹158.5 crore and ₹88.5 crore as the primary figures and flags the small discrepancy rather than papering over it.
Where the money comes from
Snapmint’s revenue mix and customer base carry a genuine surprise for anyone who pictures BNPL as a metro, premium-shopper product.
- Revenue lines: interest income from lending is the largest reported source, with merchant commissions, subvention, partner discounts and processing fees making up the balance (RoC filings, via Entrackr).
- Customer geography: the demand skews to tier-2 and tier-3 India — the same non-credit-card shoppers the 2016 ad campaign accidentally surfaced. Coverage spans 23,000 pincodes, far beyond the top metros.
- Category mix: electronics and mobile phones anchor the book, alongside appliances, fashion, travel, home and lifestyle.
- The surprise: the profitable customer is the one banks screen out. Snapmint’s edge is turning thin-file, no-credit-history buyers — usually treated as high risk — into a sub-2.5% loss book through data-heavy underwriting, which is the opposite of the intuition that “no credit card” means “bad credit.”
The risks
The risks here are concrete and mostly structural to lending, not cosmetic.
- Regulatory exposure: BNPL sits squarely under RBI scrutiny. The RBI’s June 2022 restriction on loading credit lines onto prepaid instruments (PPIs) forced peers such as Slice and LazyPay to rework their models overnight. Snapmint’s use of its own NBFC and a merchant-subvention model gives it more insulation, but any future RBI move on no-cost-EMI disclosure, default loss guarantees (FLDG) or digital-lending norms could hit its economics directly.
- Credit risk in a downturn: the entire model rests on holding credit losses below 2.5% while lending to thin-file borrowers. The COVID cohort already showed losses can spike to about 4.8%. Because the net margin is only around 1.5%, a rise in loss rates of even two points — from a macro shock or over-fast expansion — can wipe out profitability.
- Competition and margin compression: the merchant commission Snapmint depends on is contestable. Bajaj Finance dominates consumer-durable EMI at scale, large fintechs are chasing the same checkout, and UPI-native credit (credit line on UPI, RuPay credit cards) lowers the barrier for rivals. More competition for the same merchants pushes commissions — and the thin margin — down.
The takeaway
The transferable lesson is that a distribution insight can be more valuable than a product idea. Snapmint did not set out to build a lender; it noticed, inside someone else’s ad campaign, that millions of Indians were raising their hands to pay in instalments and then hitting a wall because the only instrument on offer required a credit card they would never get. The company’s real invention was not “buy now, pay later” — that already existed — but underwriting the customer everyone else declined, cheaply enough that a sub-2.5% loss rate and a merchant commission could leave 1.5% behind. The years of losses were the price of learning to price that risk. When the underwriting finally proved out in FY25, the profit and the $125 million round followed almost mechanically. The lesson: find the demand that is already visible but unserved, then earn the right to serve it by being measurably better at the boring part.
Frequently asked questions
What does Snapmint do?
Snapmint offers no-cost, no-credit-card EMI (buy now, pay later) at online and offline checkout. Shoppers split a purchase into monthly instalments using only a PAN and a UPI auto-debit mandate, with 0% interest, 0% processing fee and 0% late fee on its no-cost plans. Lending is done through its own RBI-registered NBFC.
Who founded Snapmint and when?
Snapmint was founded by IIT Bombay alumni Nalin Agrawal, Anil Gelra and Abhineet Sawa. The operating entity, Snapmint Credit Advisory Private Limited, was incorporated on 26 September 2017, with the founding insight traced to a 2016 advertising campaign.
Is Snapmint profitable?
Yes, as of FY25. Snapmint reported a net profit of ₹15 crore in the year to March 2025 — its first profitable year — after a net loss of ₹33.6 crore in FY24. Revenue rose about 79% to ₹158.5 crore (Entrackr, citing RoC filings).
How much funding has Snapmint raised?
Snapmint raised a $125 million Series B led by General Atlantic in October 2025 (with an 18.8% stake to General Atlantic). Total funding to date is put at roughly $140 million by Entrackr, while data platforms list higher cumulative figures (about $172.9 million to $181 million) depending on how debt and secondary sales are counted. The Series B valuation was not disclosed.
How does Snapmint make money if it charges 0% interest?
The borrower’s “no cost” is subsidised by the merchant, who pays Snapmint a commission of roughly 3.5% to 10% per sale. Snapmint also earns interest income through its NBFC. On a typical six-month deal the spread leaves a net margin of about 1.5% after credit losses and cost of capital (founder-stated).
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- Entrackr — “BNPL startup Snapmint raises $125 Mn led by General Atlantic,” October 2025.
- Entrackr — “Exclusive: Snapmint crosses Rs 150 Cr revenue threshold in FY25, turns profitable,” July 2025.
- Entrackr — “BNPL startup Snapmint tops up Series A round with $12 Mn,” October 2022.
- FounderThesis — “Nalin Agrawal Built Snapmint to Give India’s Next 300 Million Consumers a Smarter Way to Buy,” 2025.
- Kae Capital — “Snapmint Raises $125M Series B,” 2025.
- Inc42 — Snapmint company profile and funding data, 2026.
- Tracxn — Snapmint Credit Advisory Private Limited legal-entity profile (CIN U72200MH2017PTC300126), 2026.
- Tracxn — Snapmint Financial Services Private Limited legal-entity profile (NBFC), 2026.
- TheKredible — Snapmint financials and funding history, 2026.
- Reserve Bank of India — digital lending guidelines and PPI credit-line circular, June 2022.
- Trading Economics — USD/INR reference rate, September 2026.
Found an error? Write to us and we’ll correct it in the open, dated, on the piece.