Startup Deep Dive : Zetwerk — revenue up 40%, losses up 333%, right before the IPO

In August 2026, Zetwerk told India’s securities regulator that its revenue had grown 40% in a year, to ₹15,913 crore (roughly $1.66 billion at $1 ≈ ₹96.0, 18 September 2026, Trading Economics). In the same filing, its loss for that year had grown faster still — 333%, to ₹1,606 crore.

That is an unusual pair of numbers to carry into an initial public offering. Zetwerk is a Bengaluru-based B2B contract manufacturer that started in 2018 as software for factory project managers, failed at that in its first month, and pivoted into something much harder: taking orders from large companies and getting them made, on time, by a network of small manufacturers it does not own. It became one of India’s fastest unicorns doing this. Now, as it heads toward a stock market listing, the filing that is supposed to reassure investors shows a business whose revenue is real but whose margins are still wafer-thin, and whose FY26 loss was inflated by a founder-stake transaction and the messy exit from a business line that would not stop bleeding.

Quick facts

What they do

Zetwerk connects companies that need physical things made — machined parts, sheet-metal assemblies, electronics, even entire consumer appliances — with a network of small and mid-sized factories that can make them. A customer places an order for, say, 50,000 custom brackets or a batch of circuit boards; Zetwerk sources raw material, assigns the job to one or more manufacturers on its network, manages quality control and logistics, and delivers the finished part. Over time it has stopped being purely a matchmaker and has bought and built its own factories in forging, precision machining, electronics assembly and renewable-energy components, so it now sits somewhere between a marketplace and a manufacturer. Its customers span aerospace and defence, oil and gas, industrial capital goods, consumer electronics and apparel, and it has pushed into exports to the United States and Europe, where it now runs plants directly rather than only sourcing from India.

The origin

Amrit Acharya’s first real exposure to Indian manufacturing came at 21, when ITC put him in charge of helping build a new factory, managing hundreds of vendors and a budget of nearly ₹500 crore using little more than spreadsheets. He later did an MBA at UC Berkeley’s Haas School and worked at McKinsey in San Francisco, but left in early 2018, unhappy with advisory work and pushed by visa complications, to build something of his own in India. He teamed up with three IIT-educated friends: Srinath Ramakkrushnan, who had worked across General Motors, Acumen Fund, SELCO India, Austrian Energy and Environment, ITC and BlackBuck; Vishal Chaudhary; and Rahul Sharma. The founding insight was simple: the spreadsheet chaos Acharya had lived through at ITC was not unique to one factory — every large manufacturer in India was managing hundreds of small suppliers by phone calls and Excel, with no visibility into who could deliver what, on time, at what price.

The struggle years

The first version of Zetwerk, launched in May 2018, was software: a tool to help project managers track their existing suppliers. The team built it in about two months and pitched it to large companies. The reaction, as Acharya later described it, was consistent and useless: “They all really liked the software, but still said no.” Big companies liked the product but could not get it approved through their own procurement bureaucracy. What they did ask for was help finding new suppliers. Within a month, in June 2018, and before the seed money had even landed in the bank, the founders scrapped the SaaS plan and pivoted to a marketplace that would source manufacturing orders directly. Acharya has said the team was anxious about how its just-signed investors would react to a business model that was nothing like the one they had backed weeks earlier.

The marketplace model then ran into its own wall. Small suppliers, once discovered, often could not execute: they lacked working capital to buy raw material up front, lacked spare capacity for large or urgent orders, and struggled with logistics and quality consistency. Customers who tried the platform once did not always come back. Zetwerk’s answer was a second, riskier pivot: instead of just introducing a buyer to a supplier and stepping back, Zetwerk itself became the contracting party. It took the order, bought the raw material, financed the supplier if needed, and split large orders across multiple factories to derisk delivery timelines — absorbing working-capital and execution risk it had originally tried to avoid. That decision, made with almost no institutional credibility (“You Google us, and you would see nothing,” Acharya has said of the company’s earliest months), is the reason Zetwerk’s revenue today looks like a trading company’s rather than a lean software marketplace’s.

The turning point

The clearest before-and-after in Zetwerk’s numbers is the two years after that second pivot. Revenue from operations was about ₹21 crore in FY19, the first full year of the marketplace-turned-principal model. By FY21 it had reached ₹949 crore — roughly a 45-fold increase in two years, a pace that is rare even among venture-funded Indian startups, and one that came alongside an unusual claim for a young company: profitability on an EBITDA basis in some of those early years, even as net losses persisted after depreciation, finance costs and expansion spend. That growth curve, more than any single funding round, is what took Zetwerk from an obscure four-person pivot to a company investors were willing to call India’s newest manufacturing unicorn within roughly three years of founding.

The money behind it

Zetwerk raised a $1.5 million seed round in mid-2018 from Peak XV Partners (then Sequoia Capital India) and Kae Capital — investors who, by Acharya’s own account, backed the pivot to a marketplace even though it was not the business they had originally diligenced. Accel came in for a Series A in 2019, and Greenoaks Capital led a Series B later that year; Greenoaks went on to become one of the more persistent backers across Zetwerk’s later rounds, including its Series D. In August 2021 Zetwerk crossed unicorn status with a $150 million Series E led by D1 Capital Partners at a reported $1.33 billion valuation, and by December 2021 a Series F led by Steadview Capital, with D1 and Greenoaks participating, had pushed that up to a reported $2.7 billion — a figure the company held through a further $118 million raise in October 2023. In December 2024, Zetwerk raised about $90 million at a reported $3.1 billion valuation, in a round led by Khosla Ventures, IndiGo co-founder Rakesh Gangwal and first-time backer Baillie Gifford, with Greenoaks and Avenir Growth Capital returning; the company said the money was earmarked for its renewables, consumer electronics and aerospace segments. Press reporting around its IPO filing puts total capital raised at more than $700 million across nineteen-plus rounds, though some aggregators, likely counting debt and secondary transactions differently, put the cumulative figure closer to $900 million-$1 billion.

How it makes money

The part most outside observers get wrong about Zetwerk is assuming it runs like a typical online marketplace, clipping a commission of some fixed percentage on transactions it merely facilitates. It does not, for the bulk of its business. Because Zetwerk itself contracts with the customer and then subcontracts or self-manufactures the order, it books the full value of the transaction as revenue — raw material cost and all — and its margin is the (often single-digit) spread left after paying for materials, subcontracted labour, logistics and its own factory costs. That is closer to how a trading or engineering-procurement-and-construction firm earns money than how a two-sided marketplace does, and it explains why a company with revenue in the thousands of crores can still post an operating margin of about 2.6% in FY26, according to CRISIL Ratings’ rationale for the company’s bank facilities. Zetwerk’s own disclosures show cost of materials alone ran to ₹11,232 crore against ₹12,798 crore of FY25 revenue — about 88% of the top line consumed before any other cost is counted. The upside of this model is that it can grow revenue extremely fast by simply writing bigger contracts; the downside is that a small swing in commodity input prices, a payment delay from a customer, or a badly priced contract shows up immediately in the bottom line, because there is so little margin cushion to absorb it.

The numbers

Zetwerk’s revenue has moved in a wide band over the past four fiscal years, while losses have swung even more sharply, reflecting both real operating volatility and a series of one-off items layered on top of it.

The FY24-to-FY25 dip is largely explained by an 11% fall in gross merchandise value as trading revenue, which made up 58% of FY25 income, declined 20% to ₹7,706 crore even as manufacturing-services revenue grew 33.5% to ₹2,682 crore, according to Zetwerk’s FY25 filings reported by Entrackr. FY25’s EBITDA was a positive ₹145 crore, a roughly 1.1% margin, an improvement Zetwerk highlighted as proof of tightening operating discipline even as the top line shrank. FY26’s headline loss of ₹1,606 crore, by contrast, is not really a story about operations getting worse: according to Zetwerk’s UDRHP as reported by Inc42, it includes a ₹453 crore impairment tied to discontinuing the company’s civil infrastructure (EPC) business and roughly ₹800 crore of non-cash exceptional charges linked to founders Amrit Acharya and Srinath Ramakkrushnan raising their combined stake from about 15% to 20%, funded by a ₹600 crore personal debt-backed infusion through an entity called Creovate Innovations. Strip those one-offs out, and Zetwerk says its restated loss from continuing operations was ₹41.1 crore, down about 31% from ₹59.8 crore the year before — a very different picture from the ₹1,606 crore headline number, and a reminder that the number on the cover of a filing is not always the number that matters.

Where the money comes from

The surprise, for a company that markets itself as a manufacturing platform, is how much of its revenue has historically come from trading rather than making things. In FY25, trading activities — essentially buying and reselling raw materials and components as part of fulfilling orders — accounted for 58% of income, more than manufacturing services and construction contracts combined. That balance is shifting: manufacturing revenue grew 50% to ₹9,375 crore in FY26 from ₹6,249 crore in FY25, as the company leaned harder into owned factories in electronics, precision engineering and renewables, and as it wound down the lower-margin, working-capital-heavy civil EPC and construction-contracts segment that had contributed ₹2,242 crore of FY25 income. Geographically, Zetwerk remains overwhelmingly India-centric in headcount and facility count, even as its December 2024 fundraise and its 26-plus owned factories across the US, Germany and Spain point to a deliberate push toward exports and closer-to-customer manufacturing in aerospace, defence and renewable-energy components for Western buyers.

The risks

Three risks stand out, all traceable to Zetwerk’s own disclosures or its rating agency rather than to speculation. First, the unwind of its civil EPC business is not finished: CRISIL Ratings reaffirmed a Crisil A-/Negative outlook on Zetwerk’s bank facilities and new non-convertible debentures in June 2026, explicitly citing the risk that “higher-than-expected provisions or losses” could still emerge from exiting that segment, on top of the ₹450-plus crore already taken. Second, the business is structurally thin-margined and working-capital-hungry: CRISIL pegs Zetwerk’s FY26 operating margin at about 2.6%, its working capital cycle at 160-170 days, and its interest coverage at only 1.25-1.3 times — a combination that leaves little room for a bad quarter, a slow-paying customer or a spike in steel, aluminium or electronics-component prices before covenants or cash flow come under pressure. Third, the founder stake transaction that inflated FY26’s headline loss — a ₹600 crore personal debt-funded purchase that lifted Amrit Acharya and Srinath Ramakkrushnan’s combined holding from roughly 15% to 20%, triggering an ~₹800 crore accounting charge — is exactly the kind of related-party, pre-IPO structuring that public-market investors and proxy advisers tend to scrutinise closely once a company is listed and subject to ongoing disclosure.

The takeaway

Zetwerk’s most useful lesson is not about manufacturing at all; it is about reading growth numbers correctly. A company that books the full value of a transaction as revenue, the way a trading or EPC firm does, will always show more dramatic top-line swings than a business that only earns a slice — and a 40% revenue jump means something very different for such a company than it would for a software business with 80% gross margins. The number worth tracking for Zetwerk, before and after its listing, is not revenue growth but the trend in operating margin, working-capital days and interest coverage — the metrics that show whether scale is actually compounding into a sturdier business, or just a bigger one.

Frequently asked questions

What does Zetwerk do?

Zetwerk is a Bengaluru-based B2B contract manufacturer. It takes orders from companies that need custom parts, assemblies or finished products made, and fulfils them through a mix of a network of small and mid-sized factories and its own 26-plus owned manufacturing facilities in forging, precision machining, electronics assembly and renewable-energy components.

Who founded Zetwerk and when?

Zetwerk was founded in May 2018 (its entity was incorporated in 2017) by Amrit Acharya, Srinath Ramakkrushnan, Vishal Chaudhary and Rahul Sharma, four IIT-educated friends, with Acharya continuing as chief executive.

Is Zetwerk profitable?

No, not on a net-profit basis. Zetwerk reported a net loss of ₹1,606 crore in FY26, up from a ₹371 crore loss in FY25, though it has said its restated loss excluding one-off items was a narrower ₹41.1 crore, and it posted a positive EBITDA of ₹145 crore in FY25.

What is Zetwerk’s valuation?

Zetwerk was valued at a reported $3.1 billion in its last disclosed private funding round in December 2024, up from a reported $2.7 billion in December 2021. Its IPO valuation will be set through book-building once a price band is announced.

Is Zetwerk listed, and when is its IPO?

Zetwerk is not yet listed. It filed a confidential draft IPO prospectus with SEBI in March 2026, received SEBI approval in July 2026, filed an updated draft red herring prospectus on 13 August 2026, and is targeting a listing on the BSE and NSE around September-October 2026, with a ₹2,600 crore fresh issue plus an offer for sale by early investors and founders.

Sources

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

• Entrackr, “Zetwerk’s GMV slips 11% in FY25; posts Rs 371 Cr loss,” September 2026
• Inc42, “Zetwerk Files UDRHP For ₹2,600 Cr IPO,” August 2026
• Inc42, “IPO-bound Zetwerk FY26 loss widens to ₹1,606.2 Cr despite 40% uptick in revenue,” August 2026
• Inc42, “Zetwerk’s FY26 Revenue Jumps 24% YoY to ₹15,900 Cr,” June 2026
• CRISIL Ratings, rating rationale for Zetwerk Manufacturing Businesses Limited, June 2026
• YourStory, “[The Turning Point] How pivoting from a SaaS to marketplace model worked for B2B unicorn Zetwerk,” September 2021
• YourStory, “Contract manufacturing unicorn Zetwerk records 82% spike in FY23 loss,” October 2023
• YourStory, “Zetwerk raises $118M in Series F funding at flat valuation,” October 2023
• Forbes India, “How Zetwerk battled fear of the unknown to turn unicorn in three years”
• Business Standard, “Zetwerk records Rs 17,564 cr GMV in 2023-24, valuation at $3.1 billion,” December 2024
• Indian Startup News, “Zetwerk raises USD 90 million in a funding round at a valuation of USD 3.1 billion,” December 2024
• BusinessWorld, “Zetwerk Records Rs 17,564 Cr GMV in FY24, Secures USD 90 Mn In Funding,” December 2024
• Business Insider India, “Zetwerk raises $120 million from Greenoaks Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners,” 2021
• Outlook Business, “Zetwerk Begins IPO Roadshows, Targets September-End Listing,” September 2026

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