Seventeen years ago, lending in India mostly meant a branch, a stack of paper and a loan officer's hunch. Digital lending was barely a phrase. That was the world V.R. Govindarajan and Debasish Chakraborty walked into in Bengaluru in 2008, when they started Perfios as a software company.
The idea they held onto was plain. They believed that in the finance of the future the scarce thing would be good decisions, not money. Cash would find borrowers. Knowing which borrower to trust would be the hard part. So Perfios built tools that read a bank statement, work out income and spending, and help a lender decide.
The wave that eventually lifted it was India's shift to digital lending.
For years that was patient, unglamorous work. Banks and NBFCs adopted new systems slowly, and a software vendor sold one institution at a time. Perfios did not report a profit until FY23, and that first profit was just Rs 7.8 crore. It took close to fifteen years to turn a loss-making start into a business that paid for itself.
The wave that eventually lifted it was India's shift to digital lending. UPI, Aadhaar and account aggregators made it possible to approve a loan in minutes, and every lender doing so needed a way to check the applicant. Perfios was already inside those systems. The company says it now powers nearly 90% of India's digital loans and serves more than 1,100 financial institutions in 20 countries.
Growth came partly from buying. In 2022 it bought Karza Technologies and FintechLabs, and handed the chief executive role to Sabyasachi Goswami. In 2025 it added Clari5, a fraud detection platform, CreditNirvana for collections, and IHX, a health-insurance claims platform. In 2024 an $80 million investment from Teachers' Venture Growth made it a unicorn.
The numbers now look solid. For FY25 consolidated net profit was Rs 104.3 crore, up 46% from Rs 71.7 crore, on operating revenue of Rs 669.5 crore. Goswami has framed the ambition as 'Make in India for the world.' An IPO has been talked about since 2024, but no date has been disclosed.
The lesson is in the timeline. Govindarajan and Chakraborty picked a problem that did not yet have a market, built for it, and waited. Founders tend to ask whether an idea is early. The better question may be whether, when the market arrives, you are already the thing it needs.