Startup Deep Dive : Zeta — the Indian fintech unicorn that earns almost nothing from India

Zeta is a San Francisco-headquartered, India-built banking-technology company valued at $2 billion as of February 2025 — and almost nobody in India banks through it directly. It does not take deposits, issue its own cards to the public, or run a banking app under its own name.

Instead it sells the software that banks use to run cards, accounts and loans. And the contradiction that sits at the centre of its story is a geographic one: company filings for its Indian engineering entity show that in FY22, 90% of operating revenue was billed to a single overseas market — the UAE — while only 10% came from India, even though its best-known clients, RBL Bank, IDFC First Bank and Kotak Mahindra Bank, are all Indian. By FY24, that same Indian entity had grown revenue to ₹893 crore (~$93 million) and profit to ₹120 crore. This is the story of how a company built to sell tax-saving meal cards to Indian offices ended up running card-processing infrastructure for banks it will rarely be seen to touch.

Quick facts

What they do

Zeta builds the software layer that sits underneath a bank’s or fintech’s card, account and loan products, rather than offering any of those products to consumers itself. Its Tachyon platform is sold as a cloud-native, API-first stack covering credit and debit card issuance, transaction processing, core banking ledgers, lending and buy-now-pay-later, fraud and risk management, and card rewards — bundled so a bank can run its entire card and account lifecycle on one vendor rather than stitching together several. As of February 2025, Zeta said its platform supported more than 25 million accounts, with contracts already signed for roughly 25 million more, as reported by both TechCrunch and Zeta’s own newsroom. Its named clients span large Indian banks, including RBL Bank, IDFC First Bank and Kotak Mahindra Bank, as well as banks and fintechs across the United States, United Kingdom, Middle East and other parts of Asia. The buyer, in every case, is a regulated financial institution — not the person swiping the card.

The origin

Bhavin Turakhia was 18 when he and his brother Divyank started Directi in 1998 with roughly ₹25,000 (about $675 at the time), as per Wikipedia’s account of his career. Directi grew into a group of web-services businesses — domain registration and hosting brands including BigRock, LogicBoxes, ResellerClub and Webhosting.info — which the brothers sold to Endurance International Group for $160 million in 2014. That exit gave Turakhia both capital and a template: build infrastructure-layer software that other businesses depend on, rather than a consumer brand.

He carried that instinct into two new ventures at once — Flock, an enterprise messaging platform, and Zeta, founded in April 2015 with Ramki Gaddipati as co-founder and chief technology officer. The founding observation behind Zeta was about the state of bank technology itself. “Banks are still stuck in the ’80s. Many of them still use COBOL programming language,” Turakhia told TechCrunch in May 2021 — a decades-old mainframe language still running core systems at large financial institutions worldwide. Zeta’s original wedge into that opportunity, however, was not core banking at all: it launched selling employee tax-benefit cards, automated cafeteria payments and digital gifting products to Indian corporates, a more winnable, faster-to-sell business than trying to replace a bank’s ledger on day one.

The struggle years

The employee-benefits wedge worked well enough to get Zeta funded, but not well enough to stand alone against Sodexo, the global incumbent in corporate meal cards and benefits. In July 2019, Sodexo Benefits and Rewards Services (BRS) took a minority stake in Zeta at a $300 million valuation — and, as part of the same transaction, Zeta’s employee-benefits business was merged into Sodexo BRS India, according to Sodexo’s own newsroom announcement and reporting at the time. In effect, four years after founding, Zeta handed its first product to a bigger distribution partner rather than keep fighting for share in a category it had built the company on. That business line later became part of Pluxee, the benefits-and-rewards company Sodexo spun off and listed in 2024.

Even after that reset — with Zeta now positioned as a pure banking-technology vendor to banks and fintechs — profitability took years to arrive. Zeta’s India entity lost ₹43 crore on ₹297 crore of revenue in FY21, then narrowed that to a ₹20.7 crore loss on ₹615 crore of revenue in FY22, taking cumulative losses to roughly ₹128 crore by the end of FY22, as reported by Entrackr in January 2023 based on regulatory filings. That means Zeta was still lossmaking a full year after it had already been declared a unicorn in May 2021 — the market had priced in a bet on scale before the company’s own books showed it paying off. The turnaround to profit did not show up until FY23.

The turning point

The clearest hinge in Zeta’s history is the SoftBank Vision Fund 2 round of May 2021: $250 million at a $1.45 billion valuation, as reported by TechCrunch and Entrackr at the time, up from just $300 million less than two years earlier at the Sodexo deal in July 2019 — nearly a five-fold jump in valuation in 22 months. On one side of that event sat a company still consolidating its identity: it had just given up its founding product line, was running double-digit-crore annual losses, and by its own founder’s account was pitching banks still “stuck in the ’80s” on the idea of modern, cloud-native infrastructure. On the other side sat a company that could now walk into a large bank’s vendor-selection process with a unicorn valuation and a global-name investor behind it, rather than as an unproven Indian startup. The capital mattered less than the credibility it bought — credibility that a bank’s procurement and risk committees, historically slow to bet on young vendors for anything touching card and account infrastructure, could point to when approving Zeta as a supplier.

The money behind it

Zeta has raised roughly $390 million in total funding across four disclosed rounds, according to Tracxn and Inc42’s February 2025 reporting. The shape of that funding tracks the company’s pivot: Sodexo BRS invested in July 2019 at a $300 million valuation, the round that came bundled with the loss of Zeta’s original consumer-facing business. SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led the $250 million round in May 2021 at $1.45 billion, the unicorn-making raise. Mastercard invested $30 million in 2022 at a $1.5 billion valuation, a strategic bet that came alongside a five-year global partnership announced that April to run next-generation, multi-network credit processing for banks and fintechs on Zeta’s stack, as per Mastercard’s own newsroom. Most recently, Optum — the healthcare-services arm of UnitedHealth Group — put in $50 million in February 2025 at a $2 billion valuation, a 70% jump from the $1.15 billion pre-money valuation of the 2021 round, according to both TechCrunch and Inc42. Turakhia told TechCrunch the new capital was not really needed operationally: “In all likelihood, this $50 million is going to sit in the bank… this investment reflects a reaffirmation of our journey.” Each backer left a different mark — Sodexo cost Zeta its founding business but gave it a bigger merchant network, SoftBank gave it global standing, and Mastercard and Optum function as much as strategic customers validating the platform as they do as investors.

How it makes money

Zeta is paid by banks and fintechs for software and services, not by consumers for financial products. Its own India-entity filings describe revenue as derived “exclusively from software development services” — implementation, licensing and ongoing platform fees for running card issuance, core banking, lending and fraud modules — as reported by Entrackr in October 2023. Zeta does not itself hold the credit risk or the customer deposits on its platform; the bank client does. That structure is also where the cost base sits: employee costs made up 79% of Zeta India’s FY23 expenses (₹632 crore of ₹796 crore total, including ₹68.3 crore of non-cash ESOP charges), and a similarly dominant 80%-plus share in FY22 (₹515 crore, up 77.6% year-on-year, including ₹98.7 crore of ESOP costs), per Entrackr’s reporting on the respective annual filings. In other words, margin here is mostly a function of engineering headcount efficiency and how much a bank client pays per account onboarded, not of interest income or credit losses. The part people commonly get wrong is assuming Zeta earns something like an interchange or lending cut every time a cardholder swipes a Zeta-powered card — the way a card network or a BNPL lender does. It does not disclose a per-transaction or per-account fee publicly, but the business model it describes is closer to enterprise SaaS billed to a bank than to consumer fintech economics tied to transaction volume.

The numbers

Figures below are for Zeta’s India entity, drawn from its annual regulatory filings as reported by Entrackr (January 2023, October 2023) and YourStory (November 2024). All figures in ₹ crore.

Revenue roughly tripled between FY21 and FY24, but the more striking move is on the profit line: from a ₹43 crore loss to a ₹120 crore profit inside three years, with the FY23-to-FY24 profit jump alone coming in at 5.4 times, as YourStory reported in November 2024, driven as much by a 4.5% cut in total expenses (from ₹795.8 crore to ₹760.1 crore) as by revenue growth.

Where the money comes from

The geographic split is the part of Zeta’s story that cuts against its reputation as an Indian fintech success. In FY22, 90% of Zeta India’s operating revenue came from its UAE operations, and only 10% from India, according to Entrackr’s January 2023 report on the company’s own filings — this despite RBL Bank, IDFC First Bank and Kotak Mahindra Bank being among its most publicly cited clients. By FY23, that concentration had eased somewhat: 76% of revenue was generated internationally, spread across seven countries, per Entrackr’s October 2023 reporting, with the remainder domestic. The surprise, then, is not that Zeta serves global clients — plenty of Indian-founded technology companies do — but how heavily its books have leaned on a single overseas market at a time when its most recognisable brand associations were with Indian banks. It is, by revenue, closer to an Indian-built export business selling into UAE and other foreign financial institutions than to a company that primarily banks India.

The risks

Three risks stand out from what the company and its filings disclose. First, sales-cycle risk: Zeta sells into banks, and replacing or bolting onto a bank’s card and core-banking infrastructure involves long procurement, security-audit and regulatory-approval cycles that move on the bank’s timetable, not the vendor’s — growth depends on convincing risk-averse institutions to commit to a still-young vendor for systems that cannot fail. Second, a profitability gap between what is visible and what is not: even though Zeta’s audited India entity turned profitable in FY23 and grew profit 5.4 times in FY24, Turakhia told TechCrunch in February 2025 that the wider global business was targeting profitability only by March 2026 — meaning the one entity whose numbers are public is not the whole picture, and the timeline for the group as a whole to break even has itself moved. Third, concentration and conflict-of-interest risk built into the platform and cap table together: Tachyon runs issuance and processing for more than 25 million accounts across many banks on one shared cloud stack, so a severe outage or security incident could affect several client banks simultaneously, and two of Zeta’s named strategic backers — Mastercard and Optum — are also commercial partners or adjacent-industry players rather than purely financial investors, a structure that can align incentives but also concentrates influence among a small number of stakeholders who are counterparties as much as shareholders.

The takeaway

The transferable lesson in Zeta’s history is not about banking technology specifically — it is about what founders are willing to give up. Turakhia and Gaddipati’s founding insight, that banks run on decades-old technology and would eventually need to modernise, survived completely intact from 2015 to today. What did not survive was the first product built around that insight: the employee-benefits business that got Zeta funded was handed to Sodexo in 2019, four years in, rather than defended out of attachment to “how we started.” The product a company launches with does not have to be the product that makes it valuable — sometimes the more disciplined move is recognising which parts of the original bet were the point, and which were just the easiest place to start.

Frequently asked questions

What does Zeta do?

Zeta sells cloud-based software — its Tachyon platform — that banks and fintech companies use to issue and process cards, run core banking ledgers, manage loans and buy-now-pay-later products, and handle fraud and risk. It does not offer banking products directly to consumers.

Who founded Zeta and when?

Zeta was founded in April 2015 by Bhavin Turakhia, a serial entrepreneur who earlier built and sold the Directi group of companies, and Ramki Gaddipati, who serves as co-founder and chief technology officer.

What is Zeta’s current valuation?

Zeta was valued at $2 billion following a $50 million strategic investment from Optum in February 2025, up from $1.45 billion at its unicorn round in May 2021, as reported by TechCrunch and Inc42.

Is Zeta profitable?

Its India entity turned profitable in FY23 and grew profit 5.4 times to ₹120 crore in FY24 on ₹893 crore of revenue, per regulatory filings reported by Entrackr and YourStory. CEO Bhavin Turakhia said in February 2025 that the broader global business was targeting profitability by March 2026.

Does Zeta plan to go public?

No imminent IPO is planned. Turakhia said in February 2025 that the company’s priority was growing revenue 2.5 to 3 times, adding banking clients and entering at least two new markets before considering a public listing, as reported by YourStory.

Sources

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

• Wikipedia, “Zeta (company)”, accessed September 2026
• Wikipedia, “Bhavin Turakhia”, accessed September 2026
• TechCrunch, “Zeta becomes unicorn thanks to $250 million from SoftBank”, May 2021
• TechCrunch, “Zeta valued at $2B in new funding”, February 2025
• Inc42, “Zeta’s Valuation Jumps To $2 Bn After Funding From Optum”, February 2025
• Zeta newsroom, “Zeta Valued at $2 Billion In New $50 Million Strategic Fundraise”, February 2025
• Entrackr, “Zeta India’s revenue crosses Rs 600 Cr in FY22, losses shrink 52%”, January 2023
• Entrackr, “Zeta India crosses Rs 800 Cr revenue in FY23, turns profitable”, October 2023
• YourStory, “Zeta India’s profits jump 5.4X to Rs 120 Cr on rising revenues and lower costs”, November 2024
• YourStory, “Aggressive growth, not an IPO, is Zeta’s priority”, February 2025
• Sodexo newsroom, “Sodexo takes strategic minority stake in Zeta, an Indian fintech company”, July 2019
• Mastercard newsroom, “Zeta and Mastercard partner to power next-gen credit processing for banks and fintechs”, April 2022
• Trading Economics, USD/INR exchange rate, 18 September 2026

Found an error? Write to us and we’ll correct it in the open, dated, on the piece.