At sixteen, Kunal Shah was already earning his own money. The family had been hit by a financial crisis. His father worked in pharmaceutical distribution in South Mumbai, and profiles say the household needed side income. So he sold henna cones and pirated CDs, ran tuitions, and ran a cyber cafe out of home. Profiles describe him as financially independent as a teenager.
He chose to study philosophy at Wilson College for a practical reason: the course had classes from 8 am to 10 am, which left the rest of the day free to work. He also worked as a data-entry operator and delivery boy while in college, according to Business Today. By one account he then spent about a decade as a programmer at TIS International. Later he enrolled in a part-time MBA at NMIMS and left in 2004, saying business was taught as scoring marks rather than understanding things.
He also worked as a data-entry operator and delivery boy while in college, according to Business Today.
In 2009 he started PaisaBack, a cashback business. It stumbled into something better. A pivot of its model became FreeCharge, co-founded with Sandeep Tandon in 2010. In April 2015 Snapdeal bought it, in a deal reported at about ₹2,800 crore. One profile says Shah and Snapdeal's Kunal Bahl closed it in 22 days, without investment bankers.
After the sale he spent a long stretch travelling and studying developed countries, noticing petrol pumps without attendants and self-checkout supermarkets. That trust-based thought became CRED, incorporated as Dreamplug Technologies on 19 April 2018. Kunal said that as a philosophy graduate with no alumni network, he found it hard to hire his first two engineers. CRED had already raised $30 million from Sequoia and Ribbit before it announced itself on 26 November 2018, when the app had about 1,000 downloads and he wrote that credit cards carry "over 30 hidden charges".
CRED was the second act. The pitch: people who pay credit card bills on time are valuable, so give them a members-only club with rewards. Critics saw no clear way to make money from it, and the numbers show the cost. A 2022 valuation of about $6.4 billion fell by 43 to 45 percent in a roughly $72 million round in 2025. FY25 operating revenue rose about 16 percent to ₹2,735 crore, and operating loss narrowed 51 percent to ₹298 crore, though one source puts net loss at ₹1,457 crore. A reported $900 million Meta round at $4.5 billion remains unconfirmed.
Two things stand out. A boy who sold CDs to help his family even chose his degree around his work hours. And his two big companies both grew from pivots of something smaller. First-time founders can note that the real idea often shows up after the first one has started to work, if you are still around to notice it.