Startup Deep Dive : Transak — its UK arm keeps just 3% of the profit it makes

Transak’s UK distribution arm booked turnover of £255.04 million for the year to 31 December 2024, up roughly 26% on the year before, according to accounts the company filed with Companies House in March 2026. Almost none of that money was Transak’s to keep.

Under a transfer-pricing arrangement with its American parent, “approximately 97%” of that UK subsidiary’s profit before transfer pricing is “charged to, or absorbed by,” Transak Inc. in Delaware, the same filing states — and the sliver left behind, a £15,017 loss for the year, was wiped out by a data breach that had already cost the London unit £589,000 in stolen cryptocurrency months earlier. The pattern says something true about the wider fiat-to-crypto on-ramp business that Sami Start and Yeshu Agarwal built after 2019: enormous sums move through Transak’s pipes, and a vanishingly small fraction of that flow is actually Transak’s.

Quick facts

What Transak does

Transak sells the plumbing, not the storefront. It is a business-to-business “on-ramp” and “off-ramp”: an API and SDK that a crypto wallet, exchange or decentralised app plugs in so its own users can buy cryptocurrency with a card, bank transfer or local payment method, and sell it back to fiat, without ever leaving that app. Transak does not run a consumer-facing exchange of its own. By 2026 the company says its infrastructure is embedded in “600+ leading apps” (Transak.com, accessed September 2026), including wallets such as MetaMask, Trust Wallet, Ledger, Coinbase Wallet and Phantom. Its direct customers are those wallets and apps; their end-users are the people actually buying and selling crypto.

The origin

Transak was founded in 2019 by Sami Start, who became chief executive, and Yeshu Agarwal, who became chief technology officer, “to create simple fiat-to-crypto bridges for decentralised applications,” as the company database Coinpedia describes it. Inc42’s company profile puts it more plainly: Transak “initially focused on simplifying the onboarding process for crypto exchanges” before broadening into wider payment infrastructure. The founders built their first developer-onboarding system through Tachyon, the accelerator run by ConsenSys Mesh, according to Coinpedia — a natural launchpad, given that Transak’s earliest integrations ran on Ethereum-linked wallets.

The corporate shell that would become Transak Limited was actually incorporated in London a year earlier, on 28 August 2018, under the name Light Technology Limited, and only took the Transak name in October 2023, per its Companies House filing history. The company’s own reported account of its funding puts its first institutional money at a modest $660,000 seed round in 2021 — a rounding error next to the hundreds of millions of dollars a year it would later move through its books.

The struggle years

The clearest documented setback sits inside Transak Limited’s own statutory accounts, and it lines up exactly with the wider crypto industry’s worst year. Terra’s stablecoin collapsed in May 2022 and FTX collapsed that November, and Transak’s UK subsidiary spent 2022 holding cryptocurrency inventory on its own balance sheet as those markets fell. The unit swung from net assets of £80,163 at the end of 2021 to net liabilities of £653,794 by the end of 2022 (later restated to £586,447), according to its FY2022 and FY2023 accounts filed at Companies House. The single biggest driver was a £878,020 exceptional impairment charge against its cryptocurrency stock that year — its largest write-down on record.

The retreat that followed was just as concrete. Average headcount at the UK entity had grown to seven employees in 2022; by the end of 2023 it was back down to four, a cut of more than 40%, per the company’s own FY2023 accounts. That year brought a second impairment charge too, a further £391,256 against cryptocurrency holdings. Two straight years of crypto write-downs, alongside a shrinking London headcount, is the closest thing to a documented near-death this UK filing history shows — not a single dramatic event, but a slow, disclosed bleed that tracked the broader “crypto winter” almost to the pound.

The turning point

The event that changed Transak’s trajectory was a distribution deal, not a funding round. In 2021 — the same year it raised its $660,000 seed — Transak became a fiat on-ramp partner integrated into MetaMask, then and now the most widely used self-custody crypto wallet, alongside hardware-wallet maker Ledger, according to Coinpedia’s timeline of the company. Transak’s own published case study on the partnership corroborates the relationship and its scale: MetaMask’s Jacob Cantelle is quoted saying “we have onboarded hundreds of thousands of users from fiat to crypto and generated millions in shared revenue” together with Transak, and that MetaMask uses Transak “as the primary fiat on ramp into both the mobile app and the browser extension.”

Before that integration, Transak was a two-year-old startup with a five-figure seed round and a handful of staff. After it, the company’s footprint compounded: by 2025 it says it was integrated into 450-plus applications, serving more than 10 million users worldwide, according to funding announcements corroborated by both CoinDesk and The Block on 12 August 2025. MetaMask remained, on Transak’s own account, its flagship distribution partner throughout that growth.

The money behind it

• 2021 seed round: $660,000, per Coinpedia’s company timeline — Transak’s first disclosed institutional capital.
• May 2023 Series A: $20 million (about ₹192 crore at $1 ≈ ₹96.0, 18 September 2026, Trading Economics), led by Hong Kong-based CE Innovation Capital, with SBI Ven Capital, Sygnum, Azimut, Animoca Brands, IOSG Ventures, Third Kind Venture Capital, UOB Venture Management, Signum Capital, Genting Ventures, Istari Ventures, No Limit Holdings, Woodstock Fund, KX, Axelar, Tokentus and The Lao also participating, and angel investors Jan Hammer of Index Ventures, Charles Delingpole (founder of ComplyAdvantage) and Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon (Inc42, May 2023).
• August 2025 strategic round: $16 million (about ₹153.6 crore), co-led by stablecoin issuer Tether and China-founded IDG Capital, with Primal Capital, 1kx, Protein Capital, Fuel Ventures, returning investor CE Innovation Capital, KX VC, 3KVC and Umami Capital also in, announced 12 August 2025 and independently reported by both CoinDesk and The Block the same day.
• Total disclosed across the two institutional rounds: at least $36 million (about ₹345.6 crore) — Transak has not disclosed a combined lifetime total, and this figure reflects only the two rounds independently confirmed by press reporting this session.
• Valuation: not publicly disclosed at either the 2023 Series A or the 2025 strategic round, per The Block’s August 2025 report.

How it makes money

Transak charges a fee and a small markup on every transaction that passes through its on-ramp or off-ramp. On the off-ramp side specifically, “Transak charges only 1% per transaction,” with partner apps free to layer their own additional fee on top, according to an explainer on crypto exchange Gate’s education site describing Transak’s published fee structure. Transak Limited’s own FY2024 statutory accounts describe the underlying mechanics in more formal terms: the company sets “a markup” on the exchange rate at the point of sale, with the size of that markup depending on “the current market, competition, the geography of the location of the transaction, and the method of sale or purchase.”

Here is the part that is easy to get wrong: because Transak briefly takes ownership of the crypto or fiat it is moving — its own accounts describe it as acting “as principal” rather than as an agent — accounting rules require it to record the entire face value of every trade as turnover, and the cost of the asset it bought as “cost of sales,” rather than booking only its own fee as revenue. That is exactly why Transak Limited’s FY2024 turnover of £255.04 million bears almost no relationship to what the company actually earned: gross profit for the year was £4.06 million, just 1.6% of that turnover, per the Companies House filing. And even that thin sliver does not stay with the UK unit. Under its value-added-reseller and transfer-pricing agreement with Transak Inc., “in broad terms, 97% of the Company’s profit or loss before transfer pricing is charged to, or absorbed by, the Parent, with the Company retaining a residual margin of approximately 3%,” the filing states.

The numbers

Transak Inc., the US parent, is privately held and does not publish consolidated financial statements. The only audited numbers in the public domain are for Transak Limited, its UK reseller subsidiary, filed at Companies House — and even those were not required to disclose a profit-and-loss account in the two earliest years shown, because the company then qualified for the UK’s small-companies filing exemption. Figures below are in pounds sterling as filed; they have not been converted to rupees, since Transak’s disclosed accounts are denominated in £ and $, not ₹, and no independently verified sterling-to-rupee rate was drawn from a source opened this session.

Two exceptional items sit outside these headline numbers and explain much of the swing: a £878,020 cryptocurrency impairment in 2022 and a further £391,256 impairment in 2023 (both from crypto-market declines), followed by a £588,657 exceptional loss in 2024 tied to the security breach described below, all per the respective years’ Companies House filings.

Where the money comes from

• UK subsidiary — a single line, single market: Transak Limited’s own FY2024 accounts break its turnover down by class of business and by geography, and both come back 100% — “Cryptoasset On ramp and Off Ramp,” 100% United Kingdom (Companies House). The London entity is, by its own disclosure, a single-product, single-country operation.
• Group-wide, by asset type: of the roughly $2 billion in cumulative transaction volume Transak says it has processed, about 30% now comes from stablecoin flows rather than volatile cryptocurrencies, according to the company’s own August 2025 announcement, independently reported by both CoinDesk and The Block.
• Group-wide, by geography and licensing: Transak holds or has applied for regulatory registrations across the US (FinCEN, plus money-transmitter licences in 11 states), the UK (full FCA authorisation as a registered crypto-asset firm), the European Union (VASP registration), Canada (FINTRAC), Australia (AUSTRAC) and India (FIU-IND), per CoinDesk and The Block’s August 2025 coverage — a wider regulatory footprint than the single-market UK accounts alone would suggest.
• The surprise: despite two Bangalore-registered subsidiaries — Transak Technology India Private Limited (incorporated 2 September 2021) and Transak Labs Private Limited (incorporated 8 September 2022), both per their Ministry of Corporate Affairs filings — India does not appear as a discrete disclosed revenue segment in any statutory filing found this session; its role, on current public record, looks to be engineering and operations rather than a separately reported market.

The risks

• Market and volume risk, already realised: Transak Limited’s directors describe this candidly in their own strategic report — revenues are “influenced by underlying crypto market activity, customer transaction volumes and regulatory change.” It is not hypothetical: the 2022 downturn produced an £878,020 impairment charge and a subsequent headcount cut from seven to four at the UK unit (Companies House, FY2022 and FY2023 accounts).
• Financial crime and asset-loss risk, already realised: in 2024, “an unauthorized breach of certain of the Company’s data by a third party resulted in the theft and ultimate loss of approximately £589k of cryptocurrencies related to UK wallets,” Transak Limited’s FY2024 accounts disclose. An insurance claim recovered £252,000 (equivalent to about $322,000) of that loss for the parent company by December 2024, per the same filing — meaning roughly £337,000 of the theft was not recovered.
• Structural dependency risk: Transak Limited operates as a “value-added reseller” of its US parent’s technology under a transfer-pricing arrangement, and its own directors note the UK company depends on “the Parent for continued access to technology, branding, group support functions” as well as the pricing terms the Parent sets — a concentration of control that sits above any single market’s regulator, even as Transak layers on new licences (FCA, FinCEN, AUSTRAC and more) across an expanding list of jurisdictions.

The takeaway

The lesson in Transak’s numbers is not really about crypto. It is about what happens to any business that sits in the middle of a trade rather than owning the trade itself. Because Transak briefly takes title to the asset it is moving, standard accounting rules force it to report the entire value of that flow as revenue — which is how a company keeping roughly one rupee in every hundred that passes through it can still show a turnover in the hundreds of millions. The transferable point for anyone sizing up an infrastructure or payments business is to look past the headline turnover line entirely, and ask two narrower questions instead: what fraction of that flow does the company actually keep, and who — a parent, a partner, a platform — has first claim on what is left.

Frequently asked questions

What does Transak actually do?

Transak provides fiat-to-crypto and crypto-to-fiat “on-ramp” and “off-ramp” infrastructure — an API and SDK that wallets, exchanges and apps embed so their users can buy or sell cryptocurrency using a card, bank transfer or local payment method, without leaving that app. It says its technology is used by 600-plus apps, including MetaMask, Trust Wallet, Ledger and Coinbase Wallet, as of 2026 (Transak.com).

Who founded Transak and when?

Transak was founded in 2019 by Sami Start, who is chief executive, and Yeshu Agarwal, who is chief technology officer, according to Inc42 and Coinpedia’s company profiles. Its UK operating entity was incorporated earlier, on 28 August 2018, under the name Light Technology Limited, per Companies House.

How much money has Transak raised?

Transak’s disclosed institutional funding includes a $660,000 seed round in 2021 (Coinpedia), a $20 million Series A in May 2023 led by CE Innovation Capital (Inc42), and a $16 million strategic round in August 2025 co-led by Tether and IDG Capital (CoinDesk, The Block) — at least $36 million across the two larger, press-confirmed rounds. Its valuation has not been publicly disclosed.

Is Transak profitable?

The only audited figures in the public domain, for UK subsidiary Transak Limited, show a small profit of £31,758 in FY2023 followed by a small loss of £15,017 in FY2024, on turnover of £202.4 million and £255.0 million respectively (Companies House). Under its transfer-pricing arrangement, about 97% of that subsidiary’s profit before transfer pricing is charged to its US parent, whose own consolidated profitability is not publicly disclosed.

Is Transak listed on a stock exchange?

No. Transak is a private company at Series A funding stage, according to Inc42’s company database, with no disclosed plans for an initial public offering found in sources checked this session.

Sources

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

• Transak Limited, Strategic Report, Director’s Report and Financial Statements for the year ended 31 December 2024, filed at Companies House, March 2026.
• Transak Limited (formerly Light Technology Limited), unaudited financial statements for the years ended 31 December 2021, 2022 and 2023, filed at Companies House, December 2022, November 2023 and January 2025.
• Companies House (GOV.UK), company overview and filing history for Transak Limited, company number 11539646, accessed September 2026.
• Companies House (GOV.UK), officer and filing records for TRANSAK TECHNOLOGY INDIA PRIVATE LIMITED (CIN U72900KA2021PTC151313), via ZaubaCorp, accessed September 2026.
• Inc42, company profile “Transak – A Funded Fintech Startup Based Out Of Miami,” accessed September 2026.
• Inc42, “Transak Bags $20 Mn To Further Scale Its Web3.0 Payments & Onboarding Infra Solutions,” May 2023.
• CoinDesk, “Transak Raises $16M From IDG Capital, Tether to Scale Stablecoin Payment Network,” 12 August 2025.
• The Block, “Transak Raises $16M Strategic Round from Tether and IDG Capital to Scale Stablecoin Payments Infrastructure,” 12 August 2025.
• Coinpedia, company profile and funding/milestone timeline for Transak, accessed September 2026.
• Transak, “Metamask Case Study,” transak.com/case-study/metamask, accessed September 2026.
• Transak, transak.com homepage and company footer, accessed September 2026.
• Gate.com Learn, “What is Transak? Fiat-to-Crypto On-Ramp Solution Explained,” accessed September 2026.
• Trading Economics, USD/INR reference rate, 18 September 2026.

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