Startup Deep Dive : Vivriti Capital — how a spun-off unicorn nearly wrecked its own numbers

Vivriti Capital lends money to the businesses everyone else in Indian finance finds awkward: companies too big for a microfinance loan and too small for a bank’s corporate desk. That gap — mid-market enterprises turning over roughly ₹50 crore to ₹2,000 crore a year — produces close to a third of India’s GDP but pulls in well under a sixth of formal bank credit, by the company’s own account of the problem it was built to solve. Yet the company most people associate with Vivriti’s founders isn’t Vivriti Capital at all: it’s CredAvenue, later renamed Yubi, a debt marketplace that was spun out of Vivriti in 2020 and has since raised money at a materially higher valuation than the NBFC that birthed it.

By its FY25 numbers, the nine-year-old Chennai lender’s standalone total income had grown to roughly ₹1,507 crore, its reported net profit to about ₹359 crore, and its managed loan book to somewhere between ₹9,081 crore and ₹9,302 crore depending on which disclosure you read (as per WWIPL’s unlisted-shares data desk and Vivriti’s own FY25 statement, respectively). Along the way its consolidated books swung to an outright loss in FY23 — not because the lending business failed, but because of a stake in that very same spinoff. This is the story of an NBFC that grew up in the shadow of its own more famous offspring.

Quick facts

What they do

Vivriti Capital is a non-banking finance company that lends structured debt — term loans, working-capital lines, supply-chain finance and lease/factoring products — to what it calls mid-market enterprises: businesses with annual revenue roughly between ₹50 crore and ₹2,000 crore that are too large for microfinance or retail-focused NBFCs but too thin on collateral, credit history or ticket size to interest a large bank’s corporate lending desk. Its customers span manufacturing, logistics, renewable energy, healthcare, financial services and dozens of other sectors, and it reaches many of them not just by lending directly off its own balance sheet but by co-lending alongside partner banks, where Vivriti originates and underwrites the loan and a bank funds most of it. A sister entity, Vivriti Asset Management, channels institutional and family-office money into fixed-income funds that invest in the same mid-market credit universe, giving the group a fee-earning, capital-light business alongside the balance-sheet-heavy NBFC.

The origin

Vineet Sukumar spent close to two decades inside the plumbing of Indian debt capital markets before starting Vivriti. He sold trucks for Tata Motors in rural India, work that put him face to face with how little formal credit reaches businesses just outside India’s biggest cities, then moved to Standard Chartered Bank to learn securitisation and debt capital markets from the institutional side. He spent more than seven years at IFMR Capital and IFMR Investment Managers — as CFO and then CEO — helping build a platform that grew from a near-standing start to more than $7.5 billion of business, largely by connecting small lenders and originators to mainstream capital markets. That was the template he carried into Vivriti Capital, founded in 2017 together with Gaurav Kumar: build an NBFC that underwrites mid-market credit directly, and build the market infrastructure — data, risk frameworks, a debt marketplace — that lets institutional capital flow into a segment banks had structurally underserved. The founding thesis was less “disrupt lending” and more “professionalise a credit gap that mainstream finance had priced as too troublesome to solve.”

The struggle years

Vivriti’s timing was almost comically bad. It secured its RBI licence to operate as an NBFC in January 2018, months before Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services defaulted on its debt and triggered a liquidity freeze across every non-bank lender in the country. Established NBFCs with years of rating history suddenly could not roll over commercial paper; a brand-new, unrated lender had almost no chance of raising wholesale debt on its own credibility. Vivriti’s response was to lean hard on a single equity backer: it closed ₹200 crore from Creation Investments in December 2018, and within about two months was back at the same investor’s door for a further ₹110 crore in March 2019 — an unusually fast follow-on that suggests just how tight funding conditions were for an unproven mid-market NBFC at that moment.

It weathered that funding freeze only to run straight into the next one. Vivriti closed its ₹350 crore Series B from LGT, Lightstone and Aspada in March 2020, the same month India went into its first COVID-19 lockdown — meaning a still-young lender had to manage collections from small and mid-sized borrowers through the harshest disruption to Indian business activity in decades, under a central-bank loan moratorium that scrambled every NBFC’s usual view of who was actually distressed. And a second, quieter crisis was building on its own balance sheet: Vivriti had retained a large equity stake in CredAvenue, the debt-marketplace business it had spun out in 2020, and CredAvenue — rebranded Yubi in 2022 — kept losing money as it chased growth. Because Vivriti accounted for that stake using the equity method, Yubi’s losses flowed straight into Vivriti’s consolidated results. In FY23, Vivriti Capital’s standalone NBFC business was solidly profitable, posting a net profit of about ₹129.3 crore on standalone total income of roughly ₹671.2 crore. Its consolidated results told a different story: a share of loss from equity associates of about ₹256.6 crore — almost entirely Yubi — dragged the group to a consolidated net loss of around ₹121.7 crore for the year, even though the core lending business was making money. A profitable NBFC reporting a group-level loss because of a startup it had spun out is about as close to an identity crisis as a balance sheet can have.

The turning point

The turning point was not a single funding round; it was the decision to stop letting Yubi’s losses define Vivriti’s numbers. Through 2023 and 2024, Vivriti progressively sold down its stake in Yubi — trimming its holding to below 50% — even as Yubi’s own losses continued to narrow, falling from about ₹509.8 crore in FY23 to about ₹395.8 crore in FY24, a 22.4% reduction, as Yubi separately reported. Then, in a Composite Scheme of Arrangement sanctioned by the National Company Law Tribunal in orders dated 9 and 19 December 2025 and made effective from 1 April 2026, Vivriti Capital formally separated its NBFC lending business — transferring it into a dedicated entity, Hari and Company Investments Madras Private Limited — from its platform and asset-management businesses, according to the company’s own restructuring disclosures filed with BSE. The numbers on each side of that turning point are stark: a business that once reported a consolidated loss of ₹121.7 crore in FY23 largely because of an associate’s performance emerged, by FY25, reporting a standalone net profit of roughly ₹358.8 crore with no equity-method drag from Yubi at all. The lesson embedded in the demerger is one every young company that spins off a hot subsidiary eventually learns: keeping a stake for the upside also means carrying the downside on your own books until you finally let go.

The money behind it

Vivriti Capital has raised equity in stages since 2018, moving from a single anchor backer to a syndicate of global impact and growth investors as the loan book scaled:

• Series A, December 2018: ₹200 crore from Creation Investments, a Chicago-based private equity firm — the NBFC’s first institutional equity and its anchor investor through multiple later rounds (as reported by Business Standard, 2019)
• Follow-on, March 2019: a further ₹110 crore from Creation Investments, within roughly two months of the Series A close, at the height of the post-IL&FS funding squeeze (Business Standard, 2019)
• Series B, March 2020: ₹350 crore from LGT Lightstone Aspada — the Liechtenstein princely family’s LGT Group (via its impact arm, later rebranded Lightrock), Lightstone Ventures and Aspada Capital — taking cumulative funding to about ₹700 crore in under three years (Business Standard and Business Insider India, March 2020)
• Series C, March–May 2022: $55 million in the first close (from existing backers Lightrock and Creation Investments) followed by a $30 million second close from TVS Shriram Growth Fund 3, managed by TVS Capital — taking cumulative funding to roughly $200 million since inception (Inc42, May 2022; YourStory, March 2022)
• Later capital, 2023–2025: further debt-side and fund-level capital, including institutional commitments into Vivriti Asset Management’s credit funds, separate from equity into the NBFC itself

What each backer changed: Creation Investments gave an unrated, three-year-old NBFC the credibility and balance-sheet cushion to survive the IL&FS funding freeze; LGT/Lightrock brought patient, impact-oriented capital that let Vivriti hold its book together through the COVID-19 collections shock rather than being forced into distressed asset sales; and TVS Capital’s 2022 investment brought an India-focused growth-equity lens and closed the round that pushed lifetime funding past the $200 million mark. Because Vivriti Capital is privately held with no fresh primary equity round publicly disclosed since 2022, there is no confirmed, current market valuation from a primed round; the only visible pricing signal is the over-the-counter unlisted-share market, where InCred Unlisted and WWIPL both showed the stock trading in the ₹1,000–1,170 range through 2025–2026, implying a value of roughly ₹10.19 ‘000 crore (about $1.06 billion). Readers should treat that OTC price as an informal secondary-market indicator, not an audited or round-based valuation.

How it makes money

Vivriti earns like most NBFCs, with two extra layers of fee income the plain lending business doesn’t have:

• Net interest income: the spread between what Vivriti pays to borrow (through bonds, bank lines and NCDs) and what it charges borrowers on term loans and working-capital facilities. This came to about ₹570.7 crore in FY25, up 44.9% year-on-year, and made up roughly 40% of total income of ₹1,429.1 crore that year (Vivriti Capital, FY25 results release)
• Co-lending fee income: Vivriti originates, underwrites and services loans that a partner bank largely funds, earning origination and servicing fees without carrying the full loan on its own balance sheet — a capital-light stream that lets it grow disbursals faster than its own net worth would otherwise allow
• Debt-arranging and securitisation fees: structuring and placement fees earned from packaging mid-market loans into securitised pools or arranging bond issuances for its borrower base, a legacy of the CredAvenue debt-markets DNA the founders built before the 2020 spinoff
• Asset-management fees: Vivriti Asset Management earns management and, where applicable, performance fees on the roughly ₹5,000 crore it runs across fixed-income alternative investment funds, an asset-light revenue line that scales without a matching hit to Vivriti Capital’s own balance sheet

The part people get wrong is assuming an NBFC’s profit is simply “interest earned minus interest paid.” In FY25, Vivriti’s pre-provision operating profit of about ₹484 crore had to absorb credit costs and provisioning on a fast-growing, still-seasoning loan book before any of it reached the bottom line — and, as the FY23 numbers showed, a stake in an unrelated but formerly affiliated business can swing consolidated profit far more than the core lending spread ever does.

The numbers

Figures below are standalone (NBFC-only) unless noted, drawn from Vivriti Capital’s financial statements as tracked by unlisted-share data platforms and the company’s own investor communication. Unit: ₹ crore.

• Loan book (AUM): roughly ₹5,836 crore as of March 2023, ₹8,071 crore as of March 2024, and between ₹9,081 crore and ₹9,302 crore as of March 2025 depending on the disclosure (ICRA rating update, July 2024; WWIPL and company FY25 release, 2025–2026) — growth has decelerated from roughly 38% to roughly 15–16% year-on-year through this window
• Asset quality: gross NPA ratio fell to 0.24% as of 31 March 2025 from 0.54% as of 31 March 2024 (Vivriti Capital, FY25 results release)
• Returns, FY25: return on equity of 12.1% and return on assets of 2.85% (Vivriti Capital, FY25 results release)
• Capital adequacy and net worth, FY25: capital adequacy ratio of 21.02% and net worth of ₹2,146.9 crore, comfortably above the regulatory minimum for an NBFC (Vivriti Capital, FY25 results release)

Where the money comes from

• Reach: more than 495 mid-market enterprises financed across over 55 sectors and 20-plus Indian states since inception (Vivriti Capital, FY25 results release)
• Channel mix — co-lending: unsecured loans originated through co-lending partnerships made up about 34% of AUM as of 30 June 2025, a channel that lets Vivriti scale disbursals without funding the full loan itself
• Product mix: term loans and growth capex financing, working-capital demand loans, anchor-backed supply-chain finance, securitisation, and smaller lines of loan-against-property and loan-against-shares business
• Group-level scale: including Vivriti Asset Management’s fund AUM, group assets under management stood at roughly ₹13.18 ‘000 crore in FY25, up 24.6% year-on-year (Vivriti Capital, FY25 results release)
• The surprise: plain net interest income is not the majority of revenue. At roughly ₹570.7 crore against total income of ₹1,429.1 crore in FY25, interest spread accounted for only about 40% of what Vivriti earned — the rest came from co-lending, arranging and asset-management fees, a mix that looks more like a diversified financial-services platform than a conventional balance-sheet lender

The risks

• Regulatory risk in co-lending: the Reserve Bank of India’s tightened rules on First Loss Default Guarantees cap the guarantee a co-lending partner can provide at 5% of the loan outstanding. When RBI’s guideline changes pushed more non-performing loans in the co-lending book onto Vivriti’s own recognition in FY25 and the first quarter of FY26, losses beyond that 5% cushion land on Vivriti’s own books even though a bank funded most of the loan — a structural exposure in a channel that carries roughly a third of its AUM
• An unseasoned, fast-growing book: AUM has grown at a five-year compound rate above 40%, and the reported gross NPA ratio of 0.24% as of March 2025 is unusually low for a mid-market NBFC. Loan books typically show their true default pattern only 18 to 36 months after disbursement, so a low headline NPA ratio on a rapidly expanding book can understate risk that has simply not had time to surface yet
• Execution risk from its own 2026 demerger: the NCLT-approved scheme that separated the NBFC business into Hari and Company Investments Madras Private Limited, effective 1 April 2026, requires transferring the lending licence, lender consents, borrower contracts and rating relationships to a new legal entity — a corporate-restructuring exercise that carries real operational and regulatory continuity risk even when, as here, it is designed to make the business easier to value and finance independently

The takeaway

Vivriti Capital’s most instructive years were not its funding rounds but the ones where its own spinoff nearly wrecked its reported numbers. A profitable core lending business posted a consolidated loss in FY23 not because it misjudged credit risk, but because it kept an equity stake in a related company whose losses it was contractually obliged to absorb on paper. The transferable lesson for any founder who spins a business unit out and keeps a slice of the upside: minority ownership of a fast-growing, loss-making affiliate is not a free option — accounting rules can make you carry its downside on your own income statement long after you’ve stopped controlling its decisions. Vivriti’s eventual answer was not to fix Yubi’s losses; it was to structurally separate itself from them, first by selling down the stake and then, in 2026, by demerging entirely. Sometimes the cleanest way to protect a healthy business is to stop consolidating someone else’s.

Frequently asked questions

Is Vivriti Capital the same company as CredAvenue or Yubi?

No. CredAvenue was a debt-marketplace business spun out of Vivriti Capital in 2020 and rebranded Yubi in June 2022. Vivriti retained an equity stake in Yubi for several years, which is why Yubi’s losses showed up in Vivriti’s consolidated results, but the two have operated as separate companies since 2023, and a 2026 demerger completed the structural separation.

Who are Vivriti Capital’s main investors?

Its principal equity backers are Creation Investments (a Chicago-based private equity firm and its first institutional investor), LGT Group’s impact arm Lightrock, and TVS Capital Funds, alongside Lightstone Ventures and Aspada Capital. Cumulative equity funding reached roughly $200 million by mid-2022, according to Inc42’s reporting at the time.

Is Vivriti Capital listed on the stock exchange?

No. Its equity is privately held and trades informally over-the-counter through unlisted-share dealer platforms. Its debt instruments — non-convertible debentures — are listed on BSE, which is a separate matter from an equity listing.

What does Vivriti Capital actually lend against, and to whom?

It lends to mid-market Indian enterprises, roughly those with ₹50 crore to ₹2,000 crore in annual revenue, through term loans, working-capital facilities, supply-chain finance and co-lending arrangements with partner banks, rather than to consumers or very small businesses.

What is the biggest risk to Vivriti Capital’s business model?

Two compound each other: a loan book that has grown faster than 40% a year on a compound basis, which has not yet been tested through a full credit cycle, and a co-lending channel — about a third of AUM — where regulatory changes to loss-guarantee rules have already begun pushing more non-performing assets onto Vivriti’s own books.

Sources

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

• Vivriti Capital, “Vivriti Group Reports Strong FY25 Results,” vivriticapital.com, 2025
• Vivriti Capital, Board of Directors, vivriticapital.com, accessed September 2026
• Vivriti Capital, restructuring and demerger scheme disclosures (BSE filings), vivriticapital.com, 2025–2026
• WWIPL, “Vivriti Capital Unlisted Share Price — Financials,” wwipl.com, accessed September 2026
• InCred Unlisted, “Vivriti Capital Ltd Unlisted Share Price,” incredunlisted.com, accessed September 2026
• Inc42, “Vivriti Capital Bags $30 Mn From TVS Capital To Close Series C,” May 2022
• YourStory, “Funding alert: Vivriti Capital raises $55M in Series C round,” March 2022
• Business Standard, “Vivriti Capital raises Rs 350 cr from LGT Lightstone Aspada,” March 2020
• Business Insider India, “Vivriti Capital raises Rs 350 cr from LGT Lightstone Aspada,” March 2020
• Business Standard, “Vivriti Capital ends 2nd round of equity funding from Creation Investments,” March 2019
• YourStory, “Yubi valuation touches $1.5B after secondary sale by Vivriti Capital,” July 2023
• Entrackr, “Yubi revenue grows 47% to Rs 484 Cr in FY24, losses down 22%,” 2024
• YourStory, “Fintech unicorn CredAvenue rebrands as Yubi,” June 2022
• The Arc, “Why Vivriti is trimming 49% stake in spinoff Yubi,” 2024
• Tracxn, Vivriti Capital company and funding profile, accessed September 2026
• CARE Ratings, Vivriti Capital Limited press release, careratings.com, 2026
• ICRA, Vivriti Capital Limited rating update, icra.in, July 2024
• Business Standard, “Vivriti Asset Management receives $200 million in three credit funds,” October 2023
• Crunchbase, Vineet Sukumar person profile, accessed September 2026
• TVS Capital, Vineet Sukumar founder profile, tvscapital.in, accessed September 2026

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