Rajan Bajaj was 22 when he put his name on a company. According to profile summaries, the previous line on his resume was an internship as a business analyst at Walmart. Before that, there was another venture, Mesh Internet. Slice was not his first start. It was the one that would not let go.
He had trained as a civil engineer at IIT Kharagpur. Civil engineers build bridges. He built a payments app instead. A YourStory profile frames the turning point as an Airbnb moment: seeing a young company reshape something ordinary and deciding to try one himself.
A YourStory profile frames the turning point as an Airbnb moment: seeing a young company reshape something ordinary and deciding to try one himself.
SlicePay launched in January 2016 as a buy-now-pay-later product for students and young professionals, people who had no credit history and so, to a bank, did not exist. Then came years of pivots. The company went through several versions before it landed on a physical card in 2019, the year it got an NBFC licence from the RBI.
What almost nobody saw was how narrow that road was. Slice was built on RBI's tolerance for credit lines on prepaid instruments. It worked. In November 2021 the company raised about $220 million and became a unicorn. Seven months later, in June 2022, the RBI barred NBFCs from giving credit lines on prepaid instruments, and Slice had to shut its prepaid cards. The product that carried its name stopped.
Bajaj did something unusual with the shock. Instead of pivoting again, he looked for a bank. Slice took a stake of about 5% in North East Small Finance Bank, announced a merger in October 2023, and completed it a year later on 27 October 2024, India's first fintech-bank merger of its kind. The bank was renamed Slice Small Finance Bank in May 2025, and the RBI cleared Bajaj as MD and CEO.
The money kept coming, though at lower prices. By December 2024 Slice had raised $387 million in all, from investors including Tiger Global and Insight Partners; in September 2026 it raised another $100 million at a reported $450 million valuation. For FY26 the bank reports revenue of Rs 1,403 crore and a net profit of Rs 48.4 crore.
The founder-level lesson is not that the bank pivot was clever. It is that Bajaj built the whole thing at an age when most people are on their first job, got hit by a regulator, and chose to become part of the regulated system rather than to argue with it. Sometimes the most credible answer to the rulebook is to start playing inside it.