RUPAfi

Anubhav Jain brought a decade of banking and credit experience to a fundamental problem: small retailers and shopkeepers in India couldn't access working capital to buy inventory despite having reliable sales cycles. Traditional lending institutions ignored this segment entirely. He saw an opportunity to embed credit directly into B2B marketplaces where these businesses were already shopping.

RUPAfi launched in July 2020 with a lean founding team of three co-founders. Jain handled risk and collections, a former Google engineer (9 years at Google Docs and Spreadsheets) led technology, and a product-focused founder who'd scaled Indian startups brought product expertise. They built an embedded BNPL product that worked differently from consumer BNPL: retailers got 0% interest credit (14-60 days) to buy inventory, while suppliers paid a 2% transaction fee to RUPAfi for facilitating the sale. The model was elegant—retailers never paid anything, suppliers got cash upfront, and RUPAfi captured a processing fee.

They started with FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) and quickly expanded vertically into pharma, agriculture, fashion, and electronics. The real breakthrough came through partnerships with India's largest B2B marketplaces: they embedded RUPAfi as a payment option on Flipkart's B2B platform and Walmart's Indian retail network. By positioning their product at checkout, they achieved instant scale without traditional sales efforts.

The partnership model proved explosive. In June 2021, they had processed $100,000 in loans and earned just $5,000 in revenue. By September 2021—three months later—they'd processed $7.5 million in loans and generated $60,000 in monthly revenue. They reached 25,000 transacting SMBs across 15,000 individual transactions in their peak month. Growth accelerated because they solved a real problem: retailers could now order more inventory using Rupify credit, driving higher sales volumes for their B2B marketplace partners. Retention was sticky—85% of customers returned monthly, with most churn happening in the first three months before stabilizing. The team scaled from 25 to 60 people in three months, hiring 18 engineers to handle product, underwriting, and collections infrastructure.

RUPAfi raised a $1 million pre-seed from angel investors at ~$5 million valuation (October 2020), then a $4 million pre-Series A (March 2021) that valued the company at ~$20 million pre-money. They added $1 million in venture debt from top Indian credit funds, structured at typical venture debt terms with 1% warrants. Jain strategically chose not to put loans on their own balance sheet, instead partnering with banks and NBFCs who kept 60% of transaction fees while RUPAfi retained 40%—trading margin for rapid scaling and lower capital costs. They're now building a SaaS product for SMBs and exploring offline BNPL at point-of-sale, aiming to become omnichannel within years.