BharatPe

Timeline

1. 2018Ashneer Grover and Shashvat Nakrani found BharatPe, with Bhavik Koladiya building the first version of the product.
2. 2018The company launches a single interoperable QR code that lets a merchant accept money from any payment app.The price to the merchant is zero
3. 2019The first institutional investors come in and the merchant base grows beyond the earliest cities.
4. 2020BharatPe adds card acceptance and point of sale hardware to the QR business.
5. 2021A large funding round, reported at about 108 million dollars, values the company at roughly 900 million dollars.
6. 2021BharatPe acquires Payback India, a multi-brand loyalty programme, to get closer to the merchant's customer.
7. 2021Centrum and BharatPe win the right to take over the failed Punjab and Maharashtra Co-operative Bank.
8. 2021BharatPe and Centrum formally start Unity Small Finance Bank on 1 November.
9. 2021Co-founder Bhavik Koladiya leaves, and later sues Ashneer Grover over shares he says were never paid for.
10. 2022A leaked audio clip sets off a governance review, and the board removes Ashneer Grover as managing director in March.
11. 2022The Reserve Bank of India notifies the scheme that moves PMC Bank's business into Unity Small Finance Bank.
12. 2022BharatPe files a criminal complaint against Grover and members of his family, alleging a fraud of about 81 crore rupees. The allegation is denied and is contested.
13. 2023Nalin Negi takes over as interim chief executive and finance chief after Suhail Sameer steps down.
14. 2023Shashvat Nakrani sues Grover in the Delhi High Court over shares he says were not paid for.
15. 2023The Delhi High Court declines an interim injunction on those shares but asks for notice of any transfer.
16. 2024Nalin Negi is confirmed as chief executive, about fifteen months after taking the interim role.
17. 2024BharatPe extends merchant credit into secured lending, adding two-wheeler loans and loans against mutual funds through partners.
18. 2024BharatPe and Grover announce a settlement in September. Grover ends all association with the company and holds no shares in it.
19. 2025Unity Small Finance Bank launches Roarbank, a digital savings and RuPay credit card product, with Fintech Farm.
20. 2026The Delhi High Court restrains the bank from raising its authorised share capital without BharatPe's written consent, in a dispute between the two owners.
21. 2026The Bombay High Court upholds the merger of PMC Bank into Unity Small Finance Bank, holding that it protects depositors.
22. 2026Nakrani announces in April that he will step back from day to day operations from 1 May and move to a strategic advisory role, staying on the board.

What it does

BharatPe is an Indian financial technology company that serves small merchants rather than consumers. Its first and best known product is a single QR code that a shop can display to accept payments from any app, and around that acceptance layer it has built card machines, business software, loans and a stake in a bank. The company is headquartered in New Delhi and its parent is Resilient Innovations Private Limited.^[1]

The founding insight was that a small shop should not have to choose between payment companies. A merchant who wanted to accept digital money in the late 2010s often had to run several applications, several stickers and several settlement cycles. BharatPe offered one code that worked across networks, so a customer could pay with whatever app they already had, and the merchant saw one settlement. Nakrani has described the problem in exactly those terms: merchants and small businesses found it hard to accept digital payments, and one interoperable code solved it.^[2]

Payments, however, are not where the money is made in this model. The Reserve Bank of India, which runs the retail payment rails, has kept the merchant charge on UPI at zero, so a company that only accepts payments earns nothing from the transaction itself. BharatPe therefore earns from what sits behind the code: interest and fees on merchant loans made with partner lenders, charges on hardware and services, and its share of a bank. That is why the company describes itself as much as a lending business as a payments one.^[1]

The company sells to what the industry calls the bottom of the market, the single-counter shop, the chemist, the restaurant and the trader who had never taken a card before. That choice explains both its reach and its difficulty. Small merchants are numerous, so the addressable market is large and payments data is plentiful; they are also seasonal, cash-heavy and thinly capitalised, so a lending business built on them has to underwrite thousands of very similar borrowers rather than a few large ones. BharatPe's own materials describe the goal as financial inclusion for merchants, and its reported merchant count crossed into the millions during its expansion years, though the company has never published a regularly audited number.^[1]

History

BharatPe was founded in 2018 by Ashneer Grover and Shashvat Nakrani, with Bhavik Koladiya involved in building the original product. Grover had been a finance executive, most visibly at the grocery delivery firm Grofers, and brought a dealmaker's instinct. Nakrani was a student at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi who had grown up in Bhavnagar in Gujarat, in a family of educators, and who had already tried a small venture of his own while studying. Koladiya was the technologist who worked on the first interoperable payment system.^[1][13]

The product that came out of that pairing in 2018 was deliberately narrow. It was a QR code, not an app for shoppers, and the pitch was written for the shopkeeper: one code, any app, no charge. That offered merchants something the larger wallet companies of the period did not, and it spread through retail clusters quickly. The company's own public material has described the ambition as bringing small merchants into formal financial services rather than simply moving their payments.^[1]

Between 2019 and 2021 the company raised institutional money and widened the product. It added card machines for merchants who wanted to swipe cards, began offering merchant credit through non-banking finance partners, and in 2021 bought Payback India, a multi-brand loyalty programme, on the argument that owning the merchant's customer relationship would make its lending less risky. The same year brought the move that changed BharatPe's balance sheet and its regulation: the group joined a consortium with Centrum to take over a failed cooperative bank, and the venture opened as Unity Small Finance Bank on 1 November 2021.^[1][16]

The governance crisis of 2022 interrupted that arc. An audio clip in which Grover appeared to abuse an employee of a bank was leaked, the board ordered a review of the company's books, and in March 2022 Grover was removed as managing director while his wife, who was on the company's payroll, was also removed. Grover has denied wrongdoing throughout, and the criminal complaint the company filed at the end of 2022 has remained a contested matter rather than a settled fact. The dispute ran through courts and arbitration until September 2024, when both sides announced a settlement and said no cases against each other would continue.^[3][6][11]

What followed the dispute was a quieter company. BharatPe narrowed its attention to lending, shed some of the expansion projects of the Grover years, and named Nalin Negi, previously its finance chief, as chief executive in April 2024. In 2024 it pushed merchant credit into secured products, adding two-wheeler loans and lending against mutual funds through partners. In April 2026 Nakrani, the surviving co-founder, said he would step back from day to day operations from 1 May and move into a strategic advisory role while remaining on the board.^{[4][7][8][5][6][13][7]}

Founders and leadership

Ashneer Grover was BharatPe's first managing director and the public face of the company. He had spent years in corporate finance before founding it, and the pitch he delivered was unusually blunt for Indian fintech: he told merchants they were being overcharged and offered them a free route to accepting money. His tenure ended in March 2022 when the board removed him, and the events that followed, an internal review, a criminal complaint by the company, a set of defamation proceedings, a share dispute with his co-founder, and finally a settlement in September 2024, made him and BharatPe inseparable in the public mind for years. He has consistently denied the allegations made against him.^[3][6][11]

Shashvat Nakrani is the co-founder who stayed. He grew up in Bhavnagar, Gujarat, where his father runs an educational institute, studied textile technology at IIT Delhi from 2015, and started a small business, BookMyHaircut, while he was a student. He left the institute in 2018 to build BharatPe. In 2021, at 23, he was the youngest self-made individual on the Hurun India Rich List, on paper wealth from his stake. He was a director through the 2022 crisis, publicly backed the board's decision to remove Grover, and in April 2026 moved to an advisory role.^{[8][11][13][9]}

Bhavik Koladiya is the least visible of the three. He wrote the early technology that made a single interoperable code work, and he was a shareholder of the company before a change in ownership structure left him outside it. He left BharatPe in 2021 and sued Grover the same year to reclaim shares he said had been transferred without payment for them. His case is a reminder that in Indian startups the founding team and the shareholding do not always match, and that the paper rarely catches up with the work.^[8]

Day to day leadership sits with Nalin Negi, who joined as finance chief and became interim chief executive and finance chief in January 2023, then chief executive in April 2024. Negi's public emphasis has been unglamorous next to his predecessor's: cost discipline, lending quality and a path to profit. Nakrani publicly said in 2022 that the chief executive had his confidence, at a time when the company's own board was under scrutiny.^[4][12][10]

The merchant payments business

BharatPe's merchant business is built on acceptance rather than on a consumer wallet. A shop signs up, prints or displays a code, and from that point takes in money from any payment application the customer happens to use. Because the code is interoperable, the merchant is not tied to one company's customers, which was the specific complaint the founders set out to solve. The company also provides soundboxes and other accept-and-confirm devices so a shopkeeper knows a payment has landed even when the phone is busy.^[1]

Card acceptance is the second leg. BharatPe sells point of sale machines that take cards, and for many small shops that hardware is the first time they accept plastic at all. In practice the two legs support one another: the QR brings the merchant into the network, and the machine and the settlement account deepen the relationship, which is what makes a lending offer possible later.^[1]

• One interoperable QR code for all payment applications, with no charge to the merchant.
• Card machines and point of sale devices for shops that take plastic.
• Merchant settlement accounts and reporting, so a shop sees one set of numbers.
• Payback India, a multi-brand loyalty programme, used to bring customers back to partner merchants.^[1]
• A merchant app that carries loans, offers and account information rather than only payment history.

Zero MDR and where the money comes from

The merchant discount rate, the small cut a payment company normally keeps on each transaction, is the obvious way to make money from acceptance. On the government-backed UPI rails it has been kept at zero for merchants, and that decision shaped the entire Indian payments industry. A company cannot charge the shop, so it must earn somewhere else: from the float, from hardware, from services, or from credit.^[1]

BharatPe chose credit. Merchant lending is the engine of its economics, because a shop that already accepts digital payments gives the lender a visible daily cash flow, which is a better underwriting signal than a paper balance sheet. The company lends with non-banking finance partners and through its own channels, and the interest it earns on those loans is what pays for the free code. In April 2024 the company widened this menu by adding secured products, two-wheeler loans in partnership with OTO Capital and loans against mutual funds with Volt Money, so that borrowers could raise larger sums against an asset.^[1]

The other part of the answer is the bank. Holding 49 per cent of a small finance bank gives the group a deposit-taking institution inside it, which changes the cost of funds for lending. It is also why the 2026 dispute over the bank's share capital matters more than a normal shareholder quarrel: whoever controls the bank's capital controls how much the whole group can lend.^[11]

Lending and financial services

BharatPe's lending book is sold as a merchant benefit rather than as a bank product. A shop that has been accepting payments for some months becomes visible to the company's underwriting, and the offer arrives in the same app that shows its settlements. The stated logic is that daily digital collections make repayment easier for the borrower and safer for the lender, because instalments can be collected from the flow instead of chased after it.^[1]

The company works with non-banking finance companies and other lenders for much of this book, which lets it originate loans without holding all the risk on its own balance sheet. Alongside merchant working capital it has offered gold loans, and since 2024 secured loans against two-wheelers and mutual funds, products that usually carry lower interest and larger ticket sizes than unsecured merchant credit.^[1]

The risk in this model is concentration. Merchant lending in India is unsecured at the small end, sensitive to local economic conditions, and crowded, and a downturn in retail trade shows up first in repayment rates. BharatPe's public commentary after 2023 has stressed lending discipline for exactly this reason, and the shift toward secured lending is best read as an attempt to hold the same customers with less risk per rupee lent.^[1]

PostPe and consumer products

BharatPe's business is mostly the shop side of the counter, but the group also built a consumer offer. PostPe, launched in 2021, is a buy now pay later product that lets a shopper split a purchase into instalments at partner merchants. The logic was to sit on both sides of the transaction: the shop accepts the payment, the shopper borrows the money, and the company earns from the credit rather than from the code. Press reports during the run-up to BharatPe's public partnership with Centrum's bank described PostPe as a way to build a consumer credit book on top of the merchant network, and it was one of the products the company promoted hardest in its rapid-growth years.^[1]

The consumer credit plan was the part of the business most exposed to the crisis of 2022, because a buy now pay later book depends on public confidence in the brand and on cheap funding. PostPe continued to operate through the dispute, but the group's public emphasis after 2023 moved decisively back to merchants and to secured lending, where the borrower has an asset the lender can see. The change in emphasis is visible in the products the company now talks about: gold loans, loans against mutual funds and two-wheeler finance rather than open consumer credit.^[1]

For a reader trying to value the company, PostPe matters for a different reason. It shows how the group intended to escape the zero fee problem on UPI: if acceptance earns nothing, then the money must come from lending, and lending to a shopper can be larger and faster-growing than lending to a shop. The retreat from that idea toward secured merchant credit is a statement about risk appetite, and it is one of the clearest signals of how the post-2023 BharatPe differs from the company its founders launched.^[1]

Unity Small Finance Bank

The most consequential thing BharatPe has done is not a product. In 2021 a consortium of Centrum Financial Services and BharatPe won the right to take over Punjab and Maharashtra Co-operative Bank, a multi-state cooperative bank that the Reserve Bank of India had placed under severe restrictions in September 2019 after lending heavily to a single real estate group. The new institution, Unity Small Finance Bank, received its licence in October 2021 and began operations on 1 November 2021. Centrum holds 51 per cent and is the promoter; Resilient Innovations, BharatPe's parent, holds 49 per cent.^[11][17][12]

The failed bank carried a difficult inheritance. PMC Bank had 137 branches, most of them in Maharashtra, and it had tied up most of its loan book in one borrower, so its depositors had spent two years under withdrawal limits. The amalgamation scheme notified in early 2022 moved its business, assets and liabilities into Unity Small Finance Bank, and the new bank argued this was the only route that returned depositors their money in full. A group of depositors challenged the merger, and in March 2026 the Bombay High Court upheld it, ruling that it protected depositors' interests.^[13][14]

For BharatPe, the bank is strategic rather than decorative. It gives the group an institution that can take deposits, and it has been used to build products the parent could not offer alone: the bank launched a digital savings product, Roarbank, with the fintech firm Fintech Farm in 2025, combining a savings account with a RuPay credit card and UPI. The bank's own chief executive, Inderjit Camotra, has run it through the integration period.^[11]

Ownership, however, has not been quiet. In 2026 BharatPe and Centrum fell into a dispute over a proposed increase in the bank's authorised share capital, and the Delhi High Court restrained the bank from going ahead without BharatPe's written consent. A 49 per cent stake is enough to block a capital decision but not enough to direct one, and the case exposed that tension in public.^[11]

Revenue and financials

BharatPe is unlisted, so its accounts reach the public through filings and press reports rather than through a prospectus. Press reports put operating revenue for the year ended March 2024 at about 1,600 crore rupees, up from roughly 900 crore rupees a year earlier, with the loss for the year reported at about 800 crore rupees. The company has separately said it reached operating profitability on an EBITDA basis at the end of 2024, a claim about cash operating profit that is narrower than a net profit and should be read as such.^[1]

A payments company's headline revenue flatters the underlying business unless it is read carefully. Revenue from operations for a firm like BharatPe includes processing income, incentives and service fees that move with volume, and a large part of what the company collects is passed on or spent to keep merchants on the network. The number that matters for the survival of a lender is not gross revenue but the difference between interest earned and the cost of the money lent, plus losses on loans that are not repaid.^[1]

Two features of the group's structure complicate any comparison with a pure payments firm. The first is that the bank is a separate regulated company in which BharatPe is a large shareholder, not a subsidiary, so its deposits and loan book do not appear as BharatPe's own. The second is that the lending book is partly originated with partners, which changes how much of the credit risk and how much of the interest income lands on BharatPe's accounts in any given year.^[1][16]

Shareholding and ownership

BharatPe is not a listed company. Its parent, Resilient Innovations Private Limited, holds the operating business and the stake in Unity Small Finance Bank, and the equity is divided between the founders, employees and institutional investors accumulated across several rounds between 2019 and 2021. Among the investors reported in those rounds are Ribbit Capital and Coatue, with a wider group of funds and family offices participating over time.^[1]

Founder shareholding has changed hands twice in public. Bhavik Koladiya, who held shares in the company's early structure, went to court in 2021 to reclaim shares he said had been transferred without payment. Ashneer Grover, after leaving the board, held a disputed block of shares, and Nakrani and Koladiya both filed cases over them before the September 2024 settlement, after which Grover was reported to hold no shares in the company and no further association with it.^{[15][6][9][10]}

The company has stated that a public listing is an eventual goal, and its conduct since 2023, cutting costs, narrowing to lending and reporting operating profitability, reads as preparation for that rather than as growth for its own sake. A listing would also have to explain the bank stake to investors, which is unusual: a private fintech owning 49 per cent of a regulated small finance bank is a structure few listed peers carry.^[1][16]

Employees and offices

BharatPe's head office is in New Delhi, and the merchant-facing side of the business is distributed, because lending to shops is a business done in markets, in person, and increasingly through partner channels and field teams. The company does not publish a regular headcount. Press reports of its expansion years put the payroll above a thousand people, and the period after 2023, when the company's public emphasis turned to cost discipline, was one in which several Indian startups, BharatPe among them, trimmed teams.^[1]

The workforce has also been reshaped by the dispute. The company's senior layer changed almost completely between 2022 and 2024, with the finance chief moving up to the chief executive's chair and several Grover-era executives leaving. For a directory entry the practical point is that BharatPe's leadership today shares almost none of the names it had when the QR code was its whole business.^[4]

Acquisitions and joint ventures

• Payback India, a multi-brand loyalty programme with a large consumer membership, acquired in 2021 to give merchants a retention tool alongside payments.^[1]
• Unity Small Finance Bank, set up with Centrum Financial Services after the two won the right to take over Punjab and Maharashtra Co-operative Bank in 2021, with Centrum holding 51 per cent and BharatPe's parent 49 per cent.^[11]
• PostPe, the group's buy now pay later product for consumers, built in house rather than bought, so that the company had an offer on the shopper's side of the counter as well as the shop's.^[1]
• Lending partnerships with non-banking lenders, and since 2024 with OTO Capital for two-wheeler loans and Volt Money for loans against mutual funds.^[1]
• Roarbank, a digital savings and RuPay credit card product launched in 2025 by Unity Small Finance Bank in partnership with Fintech Farm, which shows how the bank and the fintech parent are meant to feed each other.^[11]

Competition

BharatPe competes on three fronts at once. In acceptance it faces Paytm, PhonePe and other merchant acquirers that also hand out QR codes and sound boxes, and which spend heavily to hold the shopfront. In lending it faces non-banking finance companies and banks that have their own programmes for small merchants, including lenders that are far cheaper because they take deposits. In business software it faces companies that sell billing and store management first and payments second.^[1]

The competitive field has consolidated around a few names. Paytm, Pine Labs and MobiKwik all sell to the same merchant, though with different emphases: Paytm built the widest consumer-facing network, Pine Labs went deep into the large-retail and enterprise side of acceptance, and MobiKwik has run a mix of payments and consumer credit. BharatPe's position in that field rests on the lending relationship rather than on the payment itself.^[1]

The regulator matters as much as the rival in this market. Because UPI charges are set at zero by policy, no competitor can win on price, and the fight moves to who can lend against the merchant's cash flow most cheaply and most safely. That is a competition BharatPe can only win with the bank inside its group, which is why the fight over Unity Small Finance Bank's capital in 2026 was a fight about the business model and not only about shares.^[11]

Controversies and criticism

The defining controversy at BharatPe began with a leaked audio recording in January 2022, in which Ashneer Grover appeared to threaten an employee of a bank over a share allotment. The clip circulated widely, the board ordered a review of the company's governance and books, and the dispute became public within weeks. Grover later said the recording had been edited and denied the allegations against him.^[3][11]

In March 2022 the board removed Grover as managing director, and the company's relationship with his family ended as well. The company later filed a criminal complaint in Delhi alleging a fraud of about 81 crore rupees through fake invoices and inflated charges in the procurement of manpower and other services, naming Grover and members of his family. Those allegations have been contested, denied and fought over in multiple proceedings rather than established. For a reader of the case, the honest summary is that a public company and its former founder accused each other of misconduct and settled without either side winning a judgment on the substance.^[16][5]

The share disputes ran in a separate channel. BharatPe's co-founder Bhavik Koladiya sued Grover in 2021 to reclaim shares he said were transferred without payment, and Shashvat Nakrani sued in the Delhi High Court in 2023 over shares he said had not been paid for. In December 2023 the court declined Nakrani's request for an interim injunction but directed that it be given prior notice of any proposed transfer.^[17][10]

The separation was completed in September 2024. BharatPe and Grover announced a settlement under which they agreed not to pursue the legal cases against each other, a portion of shares moved into a trust, and Grover ceased to be associated with the company and held no shares in it. India's own reporting described the settlement as the end of an unusually bitter corporate feud.^[15][6]

A second thread of criticism has followed the company's information practices. Grover, after leaving, alleged that the co-founder Bhavik Koladiya had taken data belonging to a very large number of users. That allegation was made publicly and has not been established, and no court finding supports it; it is recorded here because it was part of the public fight rather than because it is a fact about the business.^[1]

The commercial criticism of BharatPe is quieter but more enduring. A free QR code is easy for a merchant to adopt and just as easy for a rival to give away, so the payments base is not by itself a moat. The company's whole thesis depends on converting that base into a lending book with tolerable losses, and the sceptical version of the story is that merchant lending is a hard business in which the customer churns and the losses arrive late. The company's answer since 2023 has been to lend against assets rather than against hope.^[1]

Reading the numbers

Three things are worth keeping straight when reading anything about BharatPe's finances. First, revenue growth in merchant payments is not the same as margin growth, because the underlying transaction earns nothing on UPI. Second, the company reports operating profitability on an EBITDA basis, which excludes the cost of borrowing, depreciation, taxes and the credit losses that a lender must carry; a net profit figure is the harder test and has not been reported as reached. Third, the bank is a separate company in which BharatPe is a shareholder, so its deposits and loans sit outside BharatPe's own balance sheet.^[1][16]

The same caution applies to the headline numbers in circulation. Reported revenue for the year ended March 2024, at about 1,600 crore rupees, is a gross figure that includes processing and service income, and the reported loss of about 800 crore rupees is the number that matters for how much the business consumes. Both are press figures for an unlisted company and should be treated as such until the company files for a listing and publishes a prospectus.^[1]

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