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Startup Deep Dive : Xoxoday — FY23 loss widened 7X even as revenue crossed Rs 816 crore

The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for Xoxoday.

Xoxoday’s Indian operating entity, Nreach Online Services, booked a loss of ₹62 crore in FY23, nearly seven times wider than the year before, even as revenue crossed ₹816 crore (~$85 million) that year (Registrar of Companies filings, reported by Entrackr, November 2023).

Three years on, in January 2026, the same company told investors it was “growing profitably” while closing a fresh Series C round and pencilling in an IPO for late 2027 or early 2028 (PR Newswire, 14 January 2026). Reconciling a loss-making FY23 ledger with a profitable, IPO-track 2026 pitch is the real story here, and it runs through a Singapore merger, a rebrand, and a business model that looks like SaaS but spends like a trading company.

Quick facts

Company Xoxoday (Indian entity: Nreach Online Services Private Limited; global brand owned via Giift Pte Ltd, Singapore)
Founded 2012, Bengaluru, as Giftxoxo; rebranded Xoxoday in 2017
Founder(s) Sumit Khandelwal, Manoj Agarwal, Kushal Agarwal and Abhishek Kumar (2012); Abhimanyu Choudhary joined as co-founder in 2018
Businesses Plum (rewards and payouts infrastructure), Empuls (employee engagement), Compass (sales incentive and commission automation), Loyalife (customer loyalty and referrals)
Latest disclosed FY revenue ₹816 crore (~$85 million), FY23 (Registrar of Companies filing, per Entrackr, November 2023)
Latest disclosed FY profit/loss Net loss of ₹62 crore, FY23 (Entrackr, November 2023)
Listed Private; company has flagged a possible IPO in late 2027 or early 2028 (PR Newswire, 14 January 2026)
Market value / last valuation Not publicly disclosed for the January 2026 Series C round (PR Newswire, The Wire); no confirmed valuation figure exists in verifiable reporting
Key shareholders / CEO CEO Sumit Khandelwal; majority ownership held via Giift, backed by Apis Partners’ Apis Growth Fund II since March 2022, with 57 Stars joining as an investor by the January 2026 round; Pascal Xatart is Chairman

What they do

Xoxoday sells the infrastructure that lets businesses hand out rewards, incentives, and loyalty points without building that plumbing themselves. Its customers are enterprises, not consumers: companies buy Plum to send gift cards, experiences, and cash payouts to employees, customers, or channel partners; Empuls to run internal recognition, surveys, and engagement programmes; Compass to automate sales-incentive and commission payouts; and Loyalife to build customer loyalty and referral programmes. The company says it serves more than 5,000 businesses, including Infosys, Freshworks, H&M, and AT&T, across a rewards catalogue spanning more than 100 countries (PR Newswire, 14 January 2026; Xoxoday About Us page, accessed September 2026).

The origin

The company began in 2012 in Bengaluru as Giftxoxo, a digital and experience-gifting startup founded by Sumit Khandelwal and Manoj Agarwal, who were soon joined by Kushal Agarwal and Abhishek Kumar. Manoj Agarwal had earlier worked at Yahoo and Flipkart, and the founding team’s insight was narrow at first: corporate gifting in India was still built on physical vouchers and manual processes, and a digital catalogue of experiences and gift cards could be a cleaner way to do it (StartupTalky, accessed September 2026; Xoxoday About Us page, accessed September 2026). The founders bootstrapped their way to a first Bengaluru office before taking on seed capital from Kshatriya Ventures in 2013 to expand into Mumbai and Delhi.

The struggle years

Giftxoxo, as a standalone consumer-facing gifting product, did not scale the way its founders expected. By the company’s own later account, the idea was “ahead of its time” and the market for digital gift experiences was too immature to support a business on its own; the founders shut Giftxoxo down in early 2018 and rebuilt around a horizontal rewards-and-incentives platform, rebranded Xoxoday the year before, in 2017 (Xoxoday blog, “The Journey from Giftxoxo to Xoxoday,” accessed September 2026). That pivot bought the company a decade of growth, but it did not remove financial risk. After a flat 10% revenue gain in FY21, Xoxoday’s revenue jumped 2.5 times to ₹680 crore in FY22 — and the company swung from profit into its first loss, of ₹8.96 crore, that same year (Entrackr, May 2023). FY23 made the pattern starker: revenue grew a further 20% to ₹816 crore, but the loss widened nearly sevenfold to ₹62 crore, as the cost of buying the vouchers and rewards it resells outpaced the revenue those sales brought in (Entrackr, November 2023). Growth and cash-burn arrived together, unsoftened by the rebrand that preceded them.

The turning point

The clearest inflection point is dated: in February 2022, Giift — a Singapore-based loyalty infrastructure company backed by Apis Partners’ Apis Growth Fund II — invested $30 million in Xoxoday and took a majority strategic interest, combining primary and secondary capital (PR Newswire, Business Wire, YourStory, all February 2022). On one side of that event sat an India-focused SaaS company that had just posted its first loss on ₹680 crore of FY22 revenue. On the other side, three years later, sat a combined Giift-Xoxoday group operating in more than 100 countries with over 60 million users and roughly $1 billion in cumulative gross transaction value, large enough that in March 2025 Giift folded its own name into Xoxoday’s and rebranded the entire group globally as Xoxoday, backed by a fresh $70 million investment from Apis Growth Fund II (PR Newswire, 4 March 2025). The Indian entity’s own filings still show losses through FY23, but the deal itself is what turned a single-country product company into the front end of a multi-country group with the balance sheet to make a Series C and IPO plan credible by 2026.

The money behind it

Cumulative lifetime funding is a genuinely contested number: Tracxn puts it at $101 million across six rounds, CB Insights at $121.5 million across four rounds, and Inc42 at $30.52 million across four rounds (all accessed September 2026) — trackers disagree sharply enough on both round count and total that no single figure can be stated with confidence. What is independently confirmed, across multiple named-outlet reports, is at least $100 million in disclosed capital across the 2022 and 2025 rounds alone.

How it makes money

Xoxoday looks like a SaaS company from its marketing but runs, financially, much more like a reseller. In FY23, voucher and reward sales made up 97% of collections — ₹791 crore of the year’s inflows — while the single largest cost line was the procurement of those same coupons and rewards, at ₹729 crore, or 83% of total expenditure (Entrackr, November 2023).

The numbers

Three consecutive years of Registrar of Companies filings for the Indian entity are independently reported by Entrackr; no FY24 or FY25 filing has yet been made public in verifiable reporting, so those years are omitted rather than estimated.

Year Revenue (₹ crore) Profit/(Loss) (₹ crore)
FY21 270.7 Profitable (figure not disclosed)
FY22 680.2 (8.96)
FY23 816.0 (62.0)

Sources: Entrackr, May 2023 (FY21–FY22) and Entrackr, November 2023 (FY22–FY23).

Where the money comes from

The risks

The takeaway

Xoxoday’s most transferable lesson is not about rewards or gifting specifically — it is about what a founder does when a consumer product fails but the underlying infrastructure is still useful to someone else. Giftxoxo, as a direct-to-consumer gifting brand, did not work. Rather than iterate on the same customer, the founders redirected the same catalogue and payments plumbing toward enterprise buyers, and later handed majority control to a better-capitalised partner in exchange for the balance sheet and geographic reach a single India-based company could not build alone. The financials since suggest that trade bought scale before it bought profitability, and the two have not yet arrived together in a filing anyone outside the company can verify.

Frequently asked questions

What does Xoxoday do?

Xoxoday sells software and infrastructure that lets businesses run rewards, employee recognition, sales-incentive payouts, and customer loyalty programmes, primarily through its Plum, Empuls, Compass, and Loyalife products.

Who founded Xoxoday and when?

It was founded in Bengaluru in 2012 as Giftxoxo by Sumit Khandelwal, Manoj Agarwal, Kushal Agarwal, and Abhishek Kumar; Abhimanyu Choudhary joined as a co-founder in 2018. The company rebranded to Xoxoday in 2017.

Is Xoxoday the same as Giift?

They are now the same brand. Giift, a Singapore-based loyalty infrastructure company backed by Apis Partners, took a majority stake in Xoxoday in February 2022, and in March 2025 the combined group dropped the Giift name and rebranded globally as Xoxoday.

How much money has Xoxoday raised?

Confirmed, named rounds include $30 million from Giift/Apis Partners in February 2022, $70 million from Apis Growth Fund II in March 2025, and an undisclosed Series C in January 2026. Third-party trackers disagree on the lifetime total, with figures ranging from about $30 million to $121.5 million depending on the source.

Is Xoxoday profitable?

The Indian operating entity’s most recent public filing, for FY23, showed a net loss of ₹62 crore on ₹816 crore of revenue. In January 2026, the company told investors it was “growing profitably,” a company-stated claim for which no independently verified financial filing is yet public.

Sources

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

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