The Phoenix Card: How Anil Goteti Built Scapia By Returning $9M to Investors
The former Flipkart SVP shut down his first startup, gave back investor capital, and used that credibility to raise $72M for India's fastest-growing travel credit card
In an ecosystem where founders are celebrated for “persevering” through obvious failure, Anil Goteti did something almost unheard of. He shut down Protonn, his B2B platform for independent professionals, and returned approximately $9 million to investors including Matrix Partners, Binny Bansal, and Kunal Shah. Most entrepreneurs would have pivoted, burned through the runway searching for product-market fit, or simply faded into the background. Anil chose radical transparency.
We took a very bold call to return the money, shut down the business and save investors money. Somebody is going to incur a loss if you actually don’t deliver the returns. So for me, I just wanted to do the right thing responsibly if I was not able to make it happen.
That decision, made in 2021, would prove to be the most strategic move of his career. Within months of starting his next venture, Scapia, those same investors came back. Matrix (now Z47) led his $9 million seed round. Binny Bansal’s 3STATE Ventures co-led his $23 million Series A. By April 2025, Scapia had raised $40 million in Series B from Peak XV Partners, bringing total funding to over $72 million and valuation to approximately $194 million.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
From Flipkart to the Travel Bet
Before the failure, before the comeback, there was Flipkart. Anil spent eight years at India’s e-commerce pioneer, rising to Senior Vice President and managing everything from category operations to customer growth and monetization. He arrived planning to stay two or three years. He left nearly a decade later with a masterclass in building for the Indian consumer.
When we all started and worked in Flipkart at that time, there was no cloud. Flipkart had to build the cloud. There was no payment gateway. There was no supply chain. You had to build everything yourself. When you are in an ambiguous environment where nothing is defined, you learn how to deal with ambiguity and solve the problem.
After Protonn’s shutdown, Anil took a strategic three-month pause. His analysis was surgical: identify where his strengths truly were. The answer was clear: India, B2C, consumer-focused products. The global B2B market, he admitted candidly, “those are not my muscles.”
His research led him to two massive opportunities in Indian consumer spending: high-end retail and travel. Burnt out on retail from his Flipkart years and fueled by personal passion, he chose travel. The timing was perfect. Gen Z and Millennials now represent 50% of all new credit card issuances in India, and the travel technology market is projected to more than double from $374 million in 2024 to $745 million by 2033.
Building the Product: 18 Months Before Launch
Scapia didn’t rush to market. Anil spent 18 months building before the public launch in June 2023, running two parallel teams: one focused on the credit card product, another on the travel platform. They started by testing flights with 500 customers who didn’t even have cards yet, refining the booking experience. Three months later, they added hotels. Only at the 18-month mark did they launch the card itself, in partnership with Federal Bank.
The value proposition was deceptively simple: zero joining fees, zero annual fees, zero forex markup on international spending. But the real differentiation was in execution, something Anil understood from his Flipkart days spent obsessing over category management and user experience.
While most banks send transaction details hours or days later, Scapia shows transactions in real-time, within milliseconds of the card tap. When you’re spending in Tokyo and tap for 100 yen, the app immediately shows the exact rupee amount you’ll be charged, before the statement arrives.
It seems straightforward, but almost all apps and banks in the country today do not show this real-time status. We have invested across the value chain of the credit cards to make it seamless.
Even the rewards system was rebuilt from first principles. Banks typically design loyalty programs around “breakage,” the industry term for unredeemed points that expire and flow back to the issuer as profit. Scapia took the opposite approach.
Banks, unfortunately, play only on breakage. Let’s say you have 100 loyalty coins, but most likely if you don’t give you a good experience, then you will not end up using it. Only 50 of you will use it. The remaining 50, the coins will expire and I’ll make money because you have not ended up using it. But we have taken a counter view.
The result: frictionless redemption. Earn coins on every transaction, toggle them on with a button, book your travel. No complex transfer ratios, no blackout dates, no fine print. The company even innovated with “Airport Privileges,” allowing customers to spend at any airport outlet and get coins back, not just at crowded lounges.
The Unit Economics Gamble and Growth
This customer-first approach has fueled explosive growth, but at a steep cost. In FY24, Scapia’s revenue jumped 12-fold to ₹24.15 crore (approximately $2.9 million). Net losses, however, surged five-fold to ₹88 crore (approximately $10.5 million), with over 40% of expenses going to advertising and promotions.
Anil frames this not as recklessness but as strategic investment. Industry benchmarks show banks typically spend ₹3,000 to ₹3,500 to acquire each credit card customer, with a breakeven period of around three years. Scapia’s customer acquisition cost is lower, though he won’t disclose exact figures, and the company is betting that its dual revenue streams will accelerate payback.
Most people think CAC is an input, how much money you need to spend to acquire the customer. But it’s actually counterintuitive. If you build a very good product, if the customer loves it so much that they’ll go tell their friend, then the CAC becomes an output metric.
The revenue model works across multiple streams: interchange fees from every transaction (the merchant discount rate that varies by category), a revenue-sharing agreement with Federal Bank, commissions from travel bookings (flights, hotels, buses, trains, visa services), and interest income when customers convert purchases to EMIs. The company now serves several hundred thousand customers across more than 7,500 pin codes, with 40% living outside India’s top 30 cities. Growth is running at 20-30% month-on-month.
Surviving the Black Swan
Then came March 2024. The Reserve Bank of India directed Federal Bank to halt all new co-branded credit card issuances due to regulatory compliance issues. Overnight, Scapia’s growth engine shut off completely. For a venture-backed company built for hyper-growth, this was an existential threat.
Anil’s response was methodical. The company pivoted hard to retention, launching new features for existing users: AI-powered visa application services for 45 countries, bus and train bookings, a RuPay variant for the UPI network, and curated “Scapia Unmapped” travel experiences. Behind the scenes, they began pursuing partnerships with other banks to diversify and de-risk.
One month after the embargo began, Scapia closed its $40 million Series B from Peak XV Partners. In a market where overall fintech funding had dropped 26% and late-stage deals had nearly dried up, this was extraordinary validation. The pitch centered on long-term vision over short-term metrics: a massive addressable market (India is expected to reach 200 million credit cards by 2030), a product with demonstrated user love, and a team that had proven it could navigate crisis.
The fact that Peak XV invested while new customer acquisition was frozen says everything about what investors saw: the regulatory hurdle was temporary and solvable, but the team’s integrity and product quality were permanent assets.
The Credibility Compound
Scapia’s journey is ultimately a story about credibility as a long-term asset. When Anil returned that $9 million to Protonn investors, he wasn’t just being ethical, he was playing a longer game. In an ecosystem where reputation compounds faster than revenue, doing right by your backers in failure creates the foundation for success in your next attempt.
These are exactly the reasons why investors will back you again. Because you decided to do the right thing. Because when you’re running a business, you have to be very objective in some of these decisions. Tomorrow, they trust you with money even more.
Today, Scapia is actively pursuing multiple banking partnerships, with announcements expected in the coming months. The product roadmap continues to expand, with two new travel categories launching soon. The company is evolving from a travel credit card into what Anil calls a “full-stack travel companion,” though he’s deliberate about focus.
It’s important to be sharp and fight only battles that you can potentially win.
The travel-fintech convergence he bet on is playing out exactly as predicted. India’s fintech market is on track to generate $180-200 billion in annual revenue by 2030. The post-pandemic travel surge shows no signs of slowing, particularly among the young, digitally native demographic Scapia targets.
From returning $9 million to raising $72 million in under two years. From a painful shutdown to building one of India’s fastest-growing fintechs during a funding winter. That’s the phoenix arc of Anil Goteti and Scapia, a reminder that in the long game of entrepreneurship, how you handle failure matters as much as how you handle success.
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