Dragged into controversies and embroiled in legal tangles, fintech startup BharatPe was almost written off two years ago. It has since managed to flip the script.
The New Delhi-headquartered startup is raking in Rs 8-10 crore per month in profit before tax, according to two people in the know. It is also expected to report a profit before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation when it announces the fiscal 2025 results, they said.
This happened over the last two years as revenue grew and the company reined in expenses. BharatPe narrowed its net loss from Rs 927 crore in FY23 to Rs 491 crore in FY24, its regulatory filings show. Its revenue in FY24 rose 27% to Rs 1,486 crore from Rs 1,167 crore a year earlier. The company has yet to file the FY25 financials.
A massive merchant lending machinery that the fintech giant built on top of its QR code-based payment processing business aided this turnaround.
“BharatPe is giving out around Rs 700 crore in loans, mostly merchant loans, every month and the book is holding up well,” said a person close to the company. Rival Paytm disbursed north of Rs 1,000 crore in merchant loans per month in the June 2025 quarter, according to its own disclosures.
As of December 2024, BharatPe had assets under management of Rs 1,154 crore through its in-house non-banking finance company, Trillionloans Fintech.
BharatPe’s gross bad loans ranged between 2% and 3%, and more than 75% of the book has been created through merchant loans, according to a rating document in March from India Ratings and Research.
Queries emailed to BharatPe remained unanswered at press time Wednesday.
Seeking external validation
Leveraging two major business developments — a fresh and committed management team and profitability in the core business — Nalin Negi, the chief executive officer of BharatPe, has been reaching out to investors for a possible fund infusion.
“He has been doing the rounds of Mumbai and Singapore, meeting funds and pitching for a major infusion. The target is to raise $80-100 million within the next few months and then prepare for a public listing,” said a second person close to the development. “Existing investors will chip in, but the idea is to get a marquee global lead investor,” he added.
An external investor always adds validation to the business, which is especially critical from a valuation discovery point of view. For instance, wealth management platform Groww had a $200 million pre-IPO round led by Singapore sovereign fund GIC that also saw existing investors participate.
The challenge for the management continues to be valuation multiples, the person said.
“While BharatPe got a $3 billion valuation in 2021 when business was one-tenth the current size, justifying the same or even getting a higher valuation is proving to be challenging in the current business environment,” the second person said.
Since its inception in 2018, the startup has raised more than $580 million in venture money from large investors such as Tiger Global, Peak XV Partners, Dragoneer Group and Ribbit Capital. After another infusion, BharatPe wants to go public, by FY27.
This is the second attempt in two years by the fintech company to raise funds. An attempt in 2023 had fizzled out amid multiple senior-level exits and the company being entangled in legal issues, ET reported on September 5, 2023.
There was also a plan for BharatPe to sell some of its non-core assets and infuse funds into its NBFC arm, but those plans did not materialise. Now, BharatPe is working closely with Unity Small Finance Bank, in which it holds a significant stake, to power its digital payment business.
“Now that the legal issues have been solved, the management is fully focussed on rebuilding the business with a sharp focus on lending, payments and investments,” said the second person.
In September 2024, BharatPe and its founder Ashneer Grover settled all their disputes and cut all ties, with 2.0-2.5% of the disputed shareholdings being put in a trust, which will work towards the benefit of the company. The remaining shares that were in contention went back to Bhavik Koladiya, one of the founders of BharatPe, who has since moved on and started a separate company, OTPLess.
In October last year, BharatPe announced that it had around 13 million merchants and settled 450 million UPI transactions monthly. Overall, the company’s total payment value was Rs 1.7 lakh crore with Rs 29,000 crore being processed via its point-of-sale terminals.
Business diversification
While merchant lending continues to be the major revenue generator for BharatPe, the company is also doubling down on building a full-stack payment aggregation (PA) business. In May 2025, it received the Reserve Bank of India’s final approval for a PA licence.
Leveraging the banking stack of Unity SFB, BharatPe has built an in-house UPI payment switch, thereby reducing its dependence on other banks for payment processing. While BHaratPe's consumer-facing UPI payments business is very small, it wants to be the back-end processor of such transactions for merchants and other fintechs.
“We developed the complete UPI switch which was integrated directly into NPCI. Then on that UPI switch, I started building products that could power TPAP products (third-party payment apps),” Sandeep Indurkar, chief executive officer of BharatPe’s payments arm, said during a recent interaction with ET.
Indurkar joined BharatPe in May 2023 as chief business officer, after leaving ICICI Bank. He played a crucial role in building the payments back-end for Unity SFB. While most fintechs operate as a third-party application, BharatPe is leveraging its deep links with Unity to offer much of the payment processing in-house.
Indurkar had told ET then that this helped the company offer better payment settlement cycles and collection efficiency against business advances to merchants. This helps it compete with the likes of Paytm and PhonePe, which are also building strong merchant lending businesses.
Besides pushing forward with its consumer-facing payments application, BharatPe is also in a position to power the UPI payment needs of other fintech and consumer-facing applications.
Along with payments, BharatPe is also focusing on building an investment business through products such as digital gold and fixed deposit distribution.
The company is doing around Rs 10 crore of business through these investment products, which are still at an early stage, said the first person cited above.
Strength and weakness
With ex-State Bank of India chairman Rajnish Kumar helming the board of directors and ex-SBI Card executive Nalin Negi as its chief executive officer, BharatPe now has senior bankers running the show.
According to multiple people who have evaluated the firm and looked at it closely, the fintech company has matured to the point where its internal systems have been strengthened, costs have been brought down and policy controls have been put in place.
A month back the company hired Siddharth Jain as chief network officer — not a common post in fintech startups. Jain was hired to strengthen BharatPe’s corporate networks and build new revenue channels. He has previously worked with large corporations, including Coca Cola and Vodafone.
But in this fast-paced venture world, there is a flip side as well. “While the company has strengthened its processes, it has also become more like a traditional financial services company,” said a partner at a venture capital firm, who has been tracking BharatPe closely.
This has helped the brand shake off its controversial past, but at the same time dented its image of being a hyper-growth startup.
While financial frugality is needed and is much appreciated especially given the current funding climate, it also takes away the tech multiples that most of these startups demand from investors. And that brings the management back to the point where it needs to attract a credible investor to lead the current funding round and help the startup in valuation discovery. This step is extremely critical for BharatPe before it officially kicks off its IPO roadshows.
Every fintech company is getting evaluated in the context of Paytm's lacklustre performance since its IPO, the VC firm partner pointed out. Even after breaking even in the June quarter, Paytm is still trading much lower than its valuation at the time of listing.
The New Delhi-headquartered startup is raking in Rs 8-10 crore per month in profit before tax, according to two people in the know. It is also expected to report a profit before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation when it announces the fiscal 2025 results, they said.
This happened over the last two years as revenue grew and the company reined in expenses. BharatPe narrowed its net loss from Rs 927 crore in FY23 to Rs 491 crore in FY24, its regulatory filings show. Its revenue in FY24 rose 27% to Rs 1,486 crore from Rs 1,167 crore a year earlier. The company has yet to file the FY25 financials.
A massive merchant lending machinery that the fintech giant built on top of its QR code-based payment processing business aided this turnaround.
“BharatPe is giving out around Rs 700 crore in loans, mostly merchant loans, every month and the book is holding up well,” said a person close to the company. Rival Paytm disbursed north of Rs 1,000 crore in merchant loans per month in the June 2025 quarter, according to its own disclosures.
As of December 2024, BharatPe had assets under management of Rs 1,154 crore through its in-house non-banking finance company, Trillionloans Fintech.
BharatPe’s gross bad loans ranged between 2% and 3%, and more than 75% of the book has been created through merchant loans, according to a rating document in March from India Ratings and Research.
Queries emailed to BharatPe remained unanswered at press time Wednesday.
Seeking external validation
Leveraging two major business developments — a fresh and committed management team and profitability in the core business — Nalin Negi, the chief executive officer of BharatPe, has been reaching out to investors for a possible fund infusion.
“He has been doing the rounds of Mumbai and Singapore, meeting funds and pitching for a major infusion. The target is to raise $80-100 million within the next few months and then prepare for a public listing,” said a second person close to the development. “Existing investors will chip in, but the idea is to get a marquee global lead investor,” he added.
An external investor always adds validation to the business, which is especially critical from a valuation discovery point of view. For instance, wealth management platform Groww had a $200 million pre-IPO round led by Singapore sovereign fund GIC that also saw existing investors participate.
The challenge for the management continues to be valuation multiples, the person said.
“While BharatPe got a $3 billion valuation in 2021 when business was one-tenth the current size, justifying the same or even getting a higher valuation is proving to be challenging in the current business environment,” the second person said.
Since its inception in 2018, the startup has raised more than $580 million in venture money from large investors such as Tiger Global, Peak XV Partners, Dragoneer Group and Ribbit Capital. After another infusion, BharatPe wants to go public, by FY27.
This is the second attempt in two years by the fintech company to raise funds. An attempt in 2023 had fizzled out amid multiple senior-level exits and the company being entangled in legal issues, ET reported on September 5, 2023.
There was also a plan for BharatPe to sell some of its non-core assets and infuse funds into its NBFC arm, but those plans did not materialise. Now, BharatPe is working closely with Unity Small Finance Bank, in which it holds a significant stake, to power its digital payment business.
“Now that the legal issues have been solved, the management is fully focussed on rebuilding the business with a sharp focus on lending, payments and investments,” said the second person.
In September 2024, BharatPe and its founder Ashneer Grover settled all their disputes and cut all ties, with 2.0-2.5% of the disputed shareholdings being put in a trust, which will work towards the benefit of the company. The remaining shares that were in contention went back to Bhavik Koladiya, one of the founders of BharatPe, who has since moved on and started a separate company, OTPLess.
In October last year, BharatPe announced that it had around 13 million merchants and settled 450 million UPI transactions monthly. Overall, the company’s total payment value was Rs 1.7 lakh crore with Rs 29,000 crore being processed via its point-of-sale terminals.
Business diversification
While merchant lending continues to be the major revenue generator for BharatPe, the company is also doubling down on building a full-stack payment aggregation (PA) business. In May 2025, it received the Reserve Bank of India’s final approval for a PA licence.
Leveraging the banking stack of Unity SFB, BharatPe has built an in-house UPI payment switch, thereby reducing its dependence on other banks for payment processing. While BHaratPe's consumer-facing UPI payments business is very small, it wants to be the back-end processor of such transactions for merchants and other fintechs.
“We developed the complete UPI switch which was integrated directly into NPCI. Then on that UPI switch, I started building products that could power TPAP products (third-party payment apps),” Sandeep Indurkar, chief executive officer of BharatPe’s payments arm, said during a recent interaction with ET.
Indurkar joined BharatPe in May 2023 as chief business officer, after leaving ICICI Bank. He played a crucial role in building the payments back-end for Unity SFB. While most fintechs operate as a third-party application, BharatPe is leveraging its deep links with Unity to offer much of the payment processing in-house.
Indurkar had told ET then that this helped the company offer better payment settlement cycles and collection efficiency against business advances to merchants. This helps it compete with the likes of Paytm and PhonePe, which are also building strong merchant lending businesses.
Besides pushing forward with its consumer-facing payments application, BharatPe is also in a position to power the UPI payment needs of other fintech and consumer-facing applications.
Along with payments, BharatPe is also focusing on building an investment business through products such as digital gold and fixed deposit distribution.
The company is doing around Rs 10 crore of business through these investment products, which are still at an early stage, said the first person cited above.
Strength and weakness
With ex-State Bank of India chairman Rajnish Kumar helming the board of directors and ex-SBI Card executive Nalin Negi as its chief executive officer, BharatPe now has senior bankers running the show.
According to multiple people who have evaluated the firm and looked at it closely, the fintech company has matured to the point where its internal systems have been strengthened, costs have been brought down and policy controls have been put in place.
A month back the company hired Siddharth Jain as chief network officer — not a common post in fintech startups. Jain was hired to strengthen BharatPe’s corporate networks and build new revenue channels. He has previously worked with large corporations, including Coca Cola and Vodafone.
But in this fast-paced venture world, there is a flip side as well. “While the company has strengthened its processes, it has also become more like a traditional financial services company,” said a partner at a venture capital firm, who has been tracking BharatPe closely.
This has helped the brand shake off its controversial past, but at the same time dented its image of being a hyper-growth startup.
While financial frugality is needed and is much appreciated especially given the current funding climate, it also takes away the tech multiples that most of these startups demand from investors. And that brings the management back to the point where it needs to attract a credible investor to lead the current funding round and help the startup in valuation discovery. This step is extremely critical for BharatPe before it officially kicks off its IPO roadshows.
Every fintech company is getting evaluated in the context of Paytm's lacklustre performance since its IPO, the VC firm partner pointed out. Even after breaking even in the June quarter, Paytm is still trading much lower than its valuation at the time of listing.