In today’s video, we will look at top 10 most profitable Indian startups.
00:00 Introduction
00:53 #10 Wakefit
01:58 #9 Lenskart
02:52 #8 Cashfree
03:56 #7 BrowserStack
05:15 #6 Aye Finance
06:21 #5 Lendingkart
06:56 #4 OfBusiness
08:19 #3 CarTrade
09:12 #2 Boat Lifestyle
10:30 Honorable Mentions
12:46 Zerodha
#10 Wakefit: Founded by Chaitanya Ramalingegowda and Ankit Garg in 2015, Wakefit started selling mattresses online and were already making a profit within six months of operations. Today, this D2C mattress startup is selling 1,500 mattresses to their 500,000 customers every day – raking in a revenue of $26.5 million and making a profit of $1.3 million in FY20.
#9 Lenskart: Founded by Peyush Bansal in 2010, Lenskart offers an omnichannel platform for selling eyewear and lenses through their online platform and offline stores. The company has been investing heavily in setting up new physical stores – taking the number of offline stores to over 750. This is why the startup took a decade to reach profitability. In FY20, Lenskart made a revenue of $130 million with a profit of $2.4 million.
#8 Cashfree: Cashfree is a digital payments gateway platform that offers more than 100 payment methods to over 50,000 businesses around the world with a team of just 130 employees. Their ability to stay lean has not only enabled them to scale but also remain profitable from the get-go. Their profit increased 14X from just $190,000 in FY18 to $2.6 million in FY20.
#7 BrowserStack: India’s most valuable SaaS startup BrowserStack enables developers to test their apps remotely using their cross-browser testing platform that has more than 2,000 devices and is being used by over 50,000 businesses across the world. The company has been profitable since day one and they did that by never spending a single penny on marketing and investing all their earnings back into the company to build better products for their customers. In FY20, BrowserStack raked in a profit of $3.8 million.
#6 Aye Finance: SME lending startup Aye Finance has been profitable for the last three consecutive years and has disbursed loans worth more than $538 million to more than 200,000 small businesses. Aye Finance’s profits have increased to $5.3 million in FY20.
#5 Lendingkart: Founded in 2014, Lendingkart has disbursed loans worth $741 million to more than 100,000 small businesses. This fintech startup first achieved profitability in FY19 and their profits stand at $5.6 million in FY20.
#4 OfBusiness: B2B e-commerce and lending startup OfBusiness uses purchase financing – providing businesses with a loan that they can use to purchase raw materials from their e-commerce platform. The company saw huge losses at the beginning as the profits from interests hadn’t come in yet. But once those profits starting coming in, OfBusiness started making money and they are now on their way to becoming a unicorn. Their profits jumped 73X from just $150,000 in FY18 to a healthy $80 million in FY20.
#3 CarTrade: Founded in 2009, CarTrade is the only profitable online used car marketplace. This decade-old startup has already filed for an IPO and is expected to hit the stock markets soon. The company significantly decreased its losses from $20 million in FY16 to just $2 million in FY17. They first turned profitable in FY18 and they did this through internal restructuring, key acquisitions and cost-cutting measures. Today (FY20), they are making a healthy profit of $11.5 million.
#2 Boat Lifestyle: Indian consumer technology startup Boat started in 2016 by selling charging cables and were able to hit profitability within the first year as the market was flooded with Chinese smartphones. Next, the company started launching more products like earphones, headphones and smartwatches with quality and affordability in mind to target value-minded Indian consumers. This strategy only accelerated their growth. Boat’s profit’s increased by 30X from just $225,000 to $6.6 million in FY20.
#1 Zerodha: India’s largest stockbroking platform started in 2010 with the goal of making investing in stocks painless and simple. Zerodha has managed to change the entire stock trading industry single-handedly and they did it without even raising any external funding or marketing their product. Today, Zerodha charges just Rs 20 (or 0.03% as commission – whichever is lower) from their customer for every intraday trade. Thanks to that, Zerodha earned a solid $135 million in profits in FY21.
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CORRECTION: At 01:54, we have incorrectly mentioned Wakefit’s revenue as their profit – their actual profit is $1.3 million, while $26.5 million is their revenue.
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Cashfree's Profitability Story (July 2020): https://entrackr.com/2020/07/payment-gateway-cashfree-consistently-clocks-profits/
Cashfree's website: https://www.cashfree.com/
I bought a wakefit mattress. Every month they called me up and reminded me to flip it 180 degrees. Thanks, but WTF???
So we're not gonna talk about how the mattress tech business model is a complete fugazzi
Maltodextrin
Fantastic
awesome research
cc pls
BoAt ❤️
Good work 🙂
Would be nice if you mention the profit margins instead of just the numerical value of profit. It doesn't really make sense only to mention the numeric value as it is hard to benchmark
Zerodha stands for you make zero profit
Caleb I wanna know what's the core motivation behind learning more about the Indian ecosystem, while you could do about US,CHINA or Canada.
I thought you were American
Having a BWM binge rn
Thank you for this valuable information 🙏
which ones have ipo?
i being an indian dont know about most of these companies to much of research.
It is also a matter of scale. Mosambee, profitable for 6 years, generated an EBT of $4M+ on a topline of $16M, generated using just $2M VC money. Could the numbers have been (say) 10 times? Will never know given that Pine Labs (also a profitable startup at scale, BTW) acquired Mosambee. Zerodha, Zoho, FreshDesk and BrowserStack etc. are of course, rockstars.
Great work brother kudos to you! Keep going… ❤️
how come zoho is a start up it has about 12k employees and its been for 2 decade ???
I am really liking this guys video, I really hope he starts doing detailed videos on more Indian startups.
Baot best
Look at that !!!
Profitable startups mostly make profits in the LOW SINGLE DIGITS million.
Their losses, on the other hand are 10s or even 100s of millions.
Can we say PONZI?
And with Net Profit margins so low, this is EMBARASSING!
You missed dream11
Wakefit had really unethical data practices, they had Amazon site where they would collect customer phone nos and start bombarding with calls and messages