Nalin Agrawal Built Snapmint to Give India's Next 300 Million Consumers a Smarter Way to Buy
From a 2016 ad campaign anomaly to a $125M Series B, the Snapmint story is about fixing a credit system that was built to profit from mistakes.
Picture a 27-year-old in Jaipur scanning a QR code at a phone shop. He earns a salary, has a bank account, and pays with UPI every day. What he does not have is a credit card. For a long time, that single fact meant he simply could not buy the phone he wanted in installments.
That gap is what Nalin Agrawal has spent eight years building toward. His company, Snapmint, now serves 7 million monthly active users across 23,000 pincodes, financing 1.5 million purchases every month. In October 2025, General Atlantic led a $125 million Series B. FY25 revenue grew 80% year-on-year to Rs 158.5 crore. The company posted its first net profit: Rs 15 crore. None of it was obvious when the idea began, and the whole thing nearly died before it found its footing.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights
The Anomaly That Started Everything
In 2016, Nalin and his two IIT Bombay co-founders, Anil Gelra and Abhineet Sawa, were running a programmatic advertising business. The three had previously built a patent analytics firm (acquired by Netscribes) and payment systems for Yes Bank. Data and transactions were their native language.
An e-commerce client asked them to run a campaign for a new credit card EMI feature at checkout. Other campaigns delivered 8-9% lift in consumers reaching the payment page. The EMI campaign, which used the word prominently in the creative, delivered a lift of 80 to 120%. Consumers were clicking through in large numbers. Almost none transacted.
The geo analytics explained why: respondents were overwhelmingly from tier-2 cities, and they did not have credit cards. Demand existed, at real scale. The product to serve it did not. That insight led directly to what Snapmint is today: an EMI payments platform requiring nothing more than a PAN number and a UPI mandate.
How Interest-Free Credit Works, and Why It’s Hard to Copy
The first question Snapmint always has to answer is the obvious one. If consumers pay 0% interest, 0% processing fees, and 0% late fees, who absorbs the cost?
The merchant does. When a consumer buys a Rs 20,000 television on 6-month EMI through Snapmint, the brand pays a commission of 3.5% to 10%, depending on category and tenure. For high-ticket items like furniture or premium electronics, conversion lifts of 20-40% make that commission a straightforward trade. Nalin often invokes Bajaj Finance here: it has used the same offline subsidy model for decades. Snapmint rebuilt it for the internet, with machine learning replacing the human agent in a store.
In one model, you rely on the consumer making mistakes, and that is what you earn from. We are working in exactly the opposite way. We don’t make money from their mistakes.
The margins are thin. A typical 6-month transaction at 7.5% commission leaves roughly 2.5% for credit losses, 3% for cost of capital, and operational costs on top. Net margin per transaction sits around 1.5%. What makes the business defensible is not the model itself, which others could replicate, but the precision of the underwriting behind it.
Snapmint’s credit loss rate is under 2.5%. The industry benchmark is 6-8%. The model evaluates each transaction against approximately 3,000 variables, with 180-200 data points available in real time, and delivers a decision in under one second. It has been trained on over 9 million loans, 8 million of which are now fully closed. The fraud engine runs parallel to underwriting, watching for pattern anomalies, three identical smartphones shipping to the same pincode inside 15 minutes, and responding in 5-10 minutes before losses compound. This is not the kind of thing a competitor can purchase or hire quickly. Nalin estimates it takes two to three years to build a comparable system, and that Snapmint keeps improving while anyone else is catching up.
For anyone to compete, they’d first have to beat our threshold of 70 to 80% approval rates while keeping credit losses below 2.5%. Marrying those two is the key to this business.
The Term Sheet That Disappeared, and the Investor Who Stayed
After getting its NBFC license in 2019, Snapmint had a Series A term sheet for $5 million signed on March 19, 2020. India locked down on March 24. The money evaporated. For a company that had just committed to building a lending book, the timing was near-fatal.
One investor held. Prashasta Seth, later Managing Partner of Prudent Investment Managers, had been watching the model closely. He came in with $1 million not because the market was good, but because he believed the model would survive.
I love your business model. If you can come out of this period and show me it works, I’ll be happy to double down.
Prashasta Seth to Nalin, March 2020
Snapmint came out of it. Credit losses on the COVID cohort settled at 4.8%, well below any comparable benchmark. Seth returned in 2021 with $10-12 million. Revenue at the time of that investment was approximately Rs 4 crore. By FY25 it was Rs 158.5 crore. Seth’s firm led the $18 million pre-Series B in December 2024, then participated again in the $125 million General Atlantic-led round in October 2025.
The Next Bet: EMI Without a Card, on Any QR Code
The company is now building credit on UPI: a consumer scans any merchant QR code, including a PhonePe code, and sees EMI as a payment option through a pre-approved credit line held with a partner bank. RBI restricts credit lines to banks rather than NBFCs, so Nalin’s structure is a fee-based partnership: the bank holds the exposure, Snapmint manages the underwriting and collection.
We believe India will leapfrog credit cards and go straight to EMI on UPI. We’ve enabled brands to increase sales by 10 to 20%. We want to bring this to more than 100 million consumers in the next few years.
The argument is structural. Credit card penetration in India serves the top 2-3% of consumers. UPI reaches almost everyone. With 10-15 million existing Snapmint users as a starting base and the General Atlantic capital behind it, Nalin’s three-year target is Rs 1,000 crore in revenue. There is no unicorn valuation to report yet; General Atlantic holds 18.8% after the Series B, and the company has not disclosed a number. The milestone Nalin points to instead is the Rs 15 crore net profit in FY25. The model works. Now it needs to scale.
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