How Rupifi CEO Anubhav Jain grew Rupifi to $1.9M revenue and 15K customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is anubhav jain he's building a tool called rupify it's embedded lending an sme bnpl he's an entrepreneur angel investor and credit risk professional with a decade of experience in banking consumer small business lending including credit cards loans all across the life cycle underwriting acquisitions etc anubhav are you ready to take us to the top yeah i'm really excited all right so talk to me give me the paint the persona of the consumer who's taking capital from rupify usually yes we are in the b2b space so we essentially work with b2b marketplaces so our customer here uh is a small business and these are the mid to long tail of small businesses uh right now in india but it could be anywhere in the globe across the globe so uh this is a very small uh like a shopkeeper or a retailer or a or an sme who's looking to let's say go to a digital b2b marketplace or an offline b2b uh kind of a distributor and source his inventory or goods uh and because there is a certain credit cycle in which the they are able to sell those goods uh they need that working capital in the form of a credit or a line so we provide that credit line to to these small businesses uh just to give you uh some idea about these businesses they are typically uh less than uh let's say twenty thousand dollars of annual turnover so they're really really small guys got it and are you is are these loans sitting on your balance sheet or are you a marketplace you're passing these loans off to somebody else we are a managed marketplace so this does not sit on our balance sheet we work with a lot of banks and non-bank institutions uh across the country where we have a revenue and a risk sharing arrangement with them so that we onboard these customers we provide the best customer experience we have the technology it's a fully embedded product that we provide focus being we do the customer acquisition we do the underwriting we do the collections but the balance sheet is provided by the lending institution i see and how many small businesses have taken at least a dollar through your platform so as of today we have close to around 25 000 odd small businesses that have transacted with us uh we've been growing at more than 200 percent month on month for the last quarter or so that's revenue or loans done that's great when did you when did you launch the business so we launched in july 2020 it's been almost 10 years so the first uh and because this is b2b we go uh by vertical so we start with fmcg vertical we scale that we learn about that segment then we go all out which sector did you start in we started with fmcg what is that so fmcg is basically all fast moving consumer goods like grocery or all your retail products which are being used on a day-to-day basis uh fruits vegetables grocery items after that we launched in the pharmaceuticals and healthcare then recently we started with agriculture we're also present in fashion and electronics interesting take me back to some of those first loans done the fmcg factor fast moving consumer goods what was the average loan side and help me understand some of the terms sure so an average credit line that we approve for these small businesses is uh something of the order of a thousand dollars right and that thousand dollar they utilize over multiple transactions so the average transaction size for us uh can be as low as uh hundred and fifty dollars and how do you guys make money on that yeah so this is a very short in your transaction uh it's typically for like 14 days 30 days maximum 60 days and we make money through the supplier so it's a zero percent interest or a zero cost credit to the retailer but because we have acquired this retailer through the distributor or the b2b marketplace so the b2b marketplace basically provides us a fee right uh over every transaction that happens on their platform where rupe5bnpl is being used so it's almost like the seller or the merchant is providing us some kind of a discount revenue you know the way you use a credit card and you get paid by the merchant the same way uh when you use groupify bnpl the user does not pay but the merchant pays so let's just make this real i'm a grocer in india a small shop owner i use you guys you know earlier this year i take 150 from you and you say okay nathan you have to pay that back in 15 days do i pay that back daily or do i just pay 150 bucks at the end of 15 days up to you you have full flexibility okay you can pay daily you can pay it in part payments you can pay all the amount after 15 days and if you give me 150 today and then i pay it back in 15 days and i only pay back 150 that's how that works right why wouldn't people i mean where do how does how do people make money there's no there's no spread sure so what happens is this 150 does not come into your bank account it basically goes to your supplier and you get goods against this 150. so we are only helping you buy your inventory from your supplier so we charge that a certain percentage from the supplier because now we are helping the supplier increase their sales by offering bnpl to these shopkeepers got it okay and what's the fee typically like on 150 bucks what would it be it would be two percent so two percent okay so let me just play this back to you i as my local shop owner get my bananas from banana company uh i know i need x amount of bananas i'm you're gonna give i'm gonna say hey guys i want to get 150 bucks send it directly to my banana company that banana company is gonna pay you guys a hundred and uh three what is it three dollars so two percent of 150 bucks yeah correct i see and then they're getting the cash up front it's better for them they don't have to wait for me to pay them and then the whole cycle goes faster yes so so this banana the retailer is now going to order more because he has 15 days of credit cycle so he can make more orders using groupify so that the overall sales of the banana company goes up because of the bmw i see yeah that makes sense so so okay so over the past i guess last month how much capital did you put out so uh so we've done close to seven and a half million dollars of uh lending uh this month in september right uh and it's festive season coming up in india next month so we're looking to almost again double this in october now can can i take if you lent 7.5 million out and you take a 2 fee on average that's about 150 000 in revenue now are you making that or is your balance sheet partner making that so uh so we share that revenue with the balance sheet partner so we get all that revenue and then there is a certain share of that that we give to the balance sheet partner and remaining we keep it's almost like a 60 40 split you keep 60. uh no they keep 60. okay balance sheet gets 60. so so got it so 707.5 million through two percent fees 150 k you know they keep uh 60 of that so they're keeping 90 grand and then you're keeping call at 60 grand some 60 000 yeah that's impressive so you guys are doing about 60 000 a month right now in revenue yeah absolutely wow okay and that's up from i mean where was that a year ago do you remember oh a year ago we had just started because we were we were just in our first uh couple of transactions at that point uh but i can say that three months ago this number was uh five thousand dollars so we are almost 12 10 more than 10x uh in in a quarter wait sorry what was it you said in may it was how much in in june this was five thousand dollars that was your revenue five thousand wow it's gone uh more than 10 times well so if you're doing 5k in revenue what was total gmb in june um that was close to around 100 000. well so you went from 100 000 loans done in june to three months later you're like it's 7.5 million loans done in the month yeah what would you credit that growth to so uh i think it's a mix of uh a few things fun we've kind of now expanded to some of the very large players we work with a couple of the largest b2b marketplaces in india can you name a couple of those yeah so we work with the flipkart walmart group uh so all the walmart stores in india we are present today i see entire flipkart uh e-commerce platform on the b2b side we are present today right so uh so those are some of the very large partners that we work with do you own the relationship with me the shop owner do you have my email address you have my information or do you just own the relationship with the banana provider we own both so the beginning to begin with we go to the banana provider they tell us that hey i have these many customers can you provide them a bmpl option once they provide those details with us we get a consent from the from the individual shopkeepers we collect their data we get their kyc done we offer them a credit and then now i i have complete ownership of individually all those sme customers i see so the seven point five million loans in september how many okay how many pounds was that across up sorry can you repeat that yeah of the 7.5 million loans you did in august how many smbs was that across that must be around fifteen or thousand uh fifteen thousand yeah wow okay got it now um...