The Anubhav Jain Dossier: Building Rupifi, India's B2B Lending Powerhouse
An exclusive deep dive into Anubhav Jain's journey from AmEx to building Rupifi, the fintech disbursing ₹5,000 Cr+ to power India's SMEs.
The Anubhav Jain Dossier: Inside Rupifi's Mission to Solve India's $330 Billion SME Credit Problem
For a professional trained in the meticulous, risk-averse world of credit science at American Express, becoming a fourth-time startup founder seems like a contradiction. Yet, for Anubhav Jain, the Co-Founder and CEO of Rupifi, this journey was not a leap of faith but a calculated application of deep domain expertise to one of India's most significant and unsolved economic challenges. He is building a B2B financial infrastructure company that has already processed over 2.5 million transactions and disbursed more than ₹5,000 Crores in credit to the small businesses that form the backbone of India's economy.
This dossier unpacks the journey, strategy, and vision of Anubhav Jain and his category-defining venture, Rupifi. It combines his public profile with candid insights from his recent conversation on the Founder Thesis podcast, revealing the playbook used to build a company backed by Tiger Global, Bessemer Venture Partners, and India’s most iconic founders.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
The Founder's Blueprint 🧠
Anubhav Jain's approach is not that of a typical tech founder; it's that of a seasoned financial strategist who understands risk from first principles.
From Corporate Risk to the Startup Crucible
A graduate of the prestigious IIM Indore, Anubhav's career was forged in the demanding credit risk and lending departments of global giants American Express and EXL. For nearly a decade, he lived and breathed the science of underwriting, customer acquisition, and loyalty for consumer and small business lending portfolios. This experience, especially navigating the 2008 financial crisis, provided him with a robust understanding of how to build viable, resilient lending products—the very bedrock of Rupifi's strategy.
However, the entrepreneurial itch led him down a different path. His first venture was an EdTech platform, StudyBud, aimed at solving the employability gap for students in Tier-2 and Tier-3 colleges. It was a trial by fire.
“I think I was not made for EdTech. We struggled in a lot of things. We struggled to scale the business. We could not create the right technology. Our go-to-market was... a big mistake.”
His second major venture, Qbera, was a consumer lending marketplace he co-founded to provide instant personal loans. The company grew successfully, building a loan book of over ₹250 Crores with loss rates below 1%, and was ultimately acquired by InCred. But behind the successful exit was a critical lesson. Qbera had outsourced its core technology to a third party in exchange for equity. This decision starved the company of the flexibility needed to innovate and made it an un-investable business for VCs, forcing the acquisition.
This journey as a serial entrepreneur instilled in him a powerful and contrarian philosophy.
“The good thing about starting for the second time or the third time or in my case the fourth time is that you know what things you should not be doing... I think the most important learning as a founder is things that have not worked for you.”
This "negative knowledge" became his superpower, shaping everything from fundraising strategy to product development at Rupifi.
The Rupifi Thesis: Decoding the B2B Credit Chasm 🏗️
Launched in 2020, Rupifi was born from a precise diagnosis of a critical market failure. While others were focused on consumer lending, Anubhav and his co-founders, Ankit Singh and Javed Ansari, saw that millions of small SMEs in India were starved of credit. They weren't being served by traditional banks, who found the high acquisition and underwriting costs for small-ticket loans economically unviable.
The problem was a specific bottleneck in the working capital cycle.
“I'm a Kirana shop. I'm buying supplies. I am keeping them in my shop, and then I'll sell them. It will take some time... so I am out of pocket for fifteen, twenty days till that material is sold. That fifteen, twenty-day period is what I need capital for.”
Rupifi’s solution was not another loan app. It was to build a Lending-as-a-Service (LaaS) platform that embeds finance directly into the transactional journeys of B2B marketplaces.
The "Anchor-Led" Growth Strategy
Instead of the high-cost endeavor of acquiring SMEs directly, Rupifi employs an "anchor-led" model. It partners with large B2B marketplaces (the "anchors"), who then offer Rupifi's services to their vast network of SME customers.
This B2B2C approach is highly scalable and capital-efficient, creating a powerful value proposition. By embedding Rupifi's "Buy Now, Pay Later" (BNPL) solution, these marketplaces see a dramatic uplift in their own key metrics.
Key B2B Marketplace Partners Include:
Walmart (Flagship partner, case study demonstrating a 3X GMV increase)
Flipkart Wholesale
JioMart
Zomato Hyperpure
Specialized platforms like Jumbotail (Agri-tech), Retailio (Pharma), and Arzooo (Electronics).
Under the Hood: The Tech, The Team, and The Numbers ⚙️
Rupifi's competitive moat is its technology, its operational excellence, and its incredible traction.
Cash-Flow Based Underwriting
Rupifi's core IP is its underwriting engine. Instead of relying on traditional credit scores, which many SMEs lack, it analyzes real-time transactional data from the marketplace. It looks at purchase frequency, consistency, volume, and seasonality to build a dynamic picture of a business's health and its ability to repay. This allows Rupifi to serve the "un-bankable"—45% of its customers had no prior formal credit history before using Rupifi.
Collections as a Superpower
Anubhav is unapologetic about the operational grit required to build a lending business in India. His experience taught him that technology alone isn't enough.
"You can't build a lending fintech without getting your hands dirty... Today, if you see, we are one hundred and seventy members strong... Half of us are in collections."
This incredible focus on collections—combining WhatsApp reminders, IVR calls, and a 60-member on-ground team—is why Rupifi maintains an impressively low default rate of less than 0.5%, a phenomenal achievement in this segment.
Rupifi by the Numbers:
Total Disbursals: Over ₹5,000 Crores
SMEs Served: 150,000+
Cities Covered: 500+
Transactions Processed: 2.5 Million+
Total Payment Volume (TPV): Over ₹1,000 Crores (as of June 2022)
Team Strength: ~170 members
Fueling the Engine: Funding & Vision 🚀
Rupifi's funding journey reflects immense validation from a spectrum of investors, from India's most successful founders to global growth-stage powerhouses.
Initial Backing: Received from super angels like Kunal Shah (CRED), Ashneer Grover (BharatPe), and Binny Bansal (Flipkart).
Pre-Series A ($4.1M): Led by Quona Capital and Ankur Capital.
Series A ($25M): A landmark round led by global giants Bessemer Venture Partners and Tiger Global.
Venture Debt ($8M): From Alteria Capital, Trifecta Capital, and Innoven Capital.
Valuation: Reported at ₹578 Crore (approx. $70 million) as of March 2025.
Anubhav's vision extends far beyond just lending. He aims to build the "world's most powerful B2B checkout platform," a comprehensive financial operating system for B2B commerce. This ambition is balanced with a pragmatic, "heads down" execution style focused on sustainable unit economics, a philosophy that has allowed Rupifi to thrive even as the market has shifted. His journey is a testament to the power of deep expertise, learning from failure, and relentlessly solving a fundamental problem at a massive scale.
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