Four founders walked away from a successful payments exit in 2020 and immediately turned around to build another bet. This one was on credit—specifically, on the hundreds of millions of Indians who had smartphones, UPI apps, and zero access to formal lending.
Aditya Gupta, Sandeep Ghule, Anand Kapadia, and Manish Sinha had just sold TranServ, their payments infrastructure startup, to Indiabulls Consumer Finance that April. The deal was done. The checks cleared. But instead of taking the usual post-exit sabbatical, they were already sketching out Credilio Financial Technologies from a Mumbai office, fixated on a stubborn paradox: India's credit card penetration sat below 4% even as UPI transactions were exploding into the billions.
Fast forward to late April 2026, and the gamble is beginning to crystallize into numbers. On the 28th, Credilio's consumer brand Novio announced a ₹100 crore Series A—₹78 crore in equity, ₹23 crore in debt—led by Cornerstone Ventures. Participating investors included Shepherd's Hill Private Equity, ESV-Arthya AIF, Roots Ventures, and venture debt providers InnoVen Capital and Alteria Capital. Pre-money valuation: ₹300 crore.
The headline figure matters less than what's underneath. Novio crossed 100,000 active cardholders in under a year since launching in 2024. That's respectable, not remarkable. What catches the eye are the engagement metrics: 85% monthly active users, an average of 18 transactions per cardholder per month, and attrition running at just 2%. Those numbers resemble premium unsecured card portfolios, except Novio's customers are playing a completely different game.
An FD-Backed Entry Point—Simple by Design
The product itself is almost defiantly straightforward. Fixed-deposit backed RuPay credit cards. According to the company, no income verification is required and approval is instant. Minimum FD of ₹2,000. Credit limit set at 90% of the deposit value.
For someone who has never held a credit card—say, a first-time salaried worker in Indore, a student in Nagpur, a gig driver in Coimbatore—it's a structured on-ramp into the formal credit system. The average FD parked by Novio users hovers around ₹9,000. Physical cards get issued only for deposits above ₹10,000. These aren't high-value customers by any traditional fintech playbook, but that engagement rate suggests the product is resonating.
Gupta told Inc42 in late April that Novio is already mapping upsell pathways for disciplined payers—including a co-branded YES BANK unsecured card slated to launch soon. The company's bet is that behavioral data from the secured card cohort will de-risk underwriting on the unsecured side.
Where Novio diverges from the typical secured card story is its UPI layer. The Reserve Bank of India allowed credit cards to be linked to UPI back in 2023, but rollout has been uneven and consumer adoption patchy. Novio's stated reward structure—5% "novio coins" on UPI transactions, 5% on card swipes, stacked to 10% when you use a Novio card via UPI—is engineered to drive dual-channel usage.
The company states it has received approval from NPCI as a Third Party App Provider, though independent verification of this status remains pending as of early 2026.
Banking Ties: A Patchwork of Partners
Novio currently lists three issuing partners on its website: SBM Bank India, DCB Bank, and YES BANK. A fourth—RBL Bank—appears in terms and conditions documents available as of late 2025 but is not listed on Novio's public product grid as of late April 2026, based on the current website status. The reasons for the difference are unclear.
The DCB partnership, announced in October 2025, was explicitly pitched around UPI-enabled secured cards for "new to credit" users. That same month, a competitor called ZET launched its own DCB-backed card. Tata Neu and Kredit.pe are also chasing FD-secured card distribution. The differentiation here isn't product innovation—secured credit cards predate fintech by decades—it's distribution efficiency, engagement stickiness, and how successfully you funnel users into higher-margin products.
Which means the real story is less about the card itself and more about whether Novio can turn secured card users into long-term, profitable relationships.
The B2B Moat Beneath the Consumer Brand
Credilio's consumer push sits atop a B2B credit marketplace the team has been quietly building since 2020. The Credilio Pro app—last updated in October 2025—has racked up over 100,000 downloads and serves direct selling agents and advisors distributing cards and loans from somewhere between 25 and 35 lenders, depending on which marketing materials you read.
There's also a white-label API offering called Credilio Play, which lets partners like e-commerce platforms and fintechs embed credit products with what the company claims is a two-day integration window. In September 2024, Credilio referenced partnerships with BookMyShow and Turtlemint for credit distribution, though the current status of those integrations is not publicly detailed.
The B2B strategy functions as a hedge. If consumer acquisition costs balloon or engagement on Novio plateaus, the underlying platform keeps generating revenue from partner commissions and DSA payouts. It's a prudent diversification, particularly given how volatile consumer fintech unit economics can be.
That structural balance shows up in the financials. FY25 revenue hit ₹82 crore with losses around ₹18 crore. Unaudited FY26 revenue climbed to roughly ₹100 crore—a 21% year-over-year bump—while losses held flat at ₹18 crore. The company employs somewhere between 51 and 200 people, according to LinkedIn data from early April 2026. (The range is wide enough to suggest either rapid hiring fluctuations or incomplete disclosure.)
The Moonshot: Five Million Cards in Three Years
Novio's Series A pitch hinges on a big, round number: 50 lakh card issuances within three years. Five million cards.
Getting there from 100,000 active users requires compounding growth at a pace that few secured card programs have achieved in India. It also requires sustained engagement—not just sign-ups, but repeat usage and low churn. The company is targeting Tier II-V cities, expanding its banking partnerships, and building AI-powered credit advisory tools inside the app. One such feature, "novio Score," offers users personalized video guidance to improve their credit profiles toward a 750+ score. How the underlying algorithm works, beyond marketing language, remains vague.
Gupta's nearer-term target is 500,000 users by FY27. The company also plans to introduce EMI options as soon as May 2026, moving beyond pure revolving credit into structured installment lending. Whether those products will maintain the FD-backing model or migrate users toward unsecured lines is still unclear.
Execution Risk in the Inclusion Narrative
Financial inclusion stories tend to lead with aspiration and underplay execution risk. Novio's engagement metrics are strong, but they're built on a customer base that, by definition, starts with limited credit history and modest transaction sizes. The 2% attrition rate is impressive. It's also early. The real test arrives at scale, when underwriting mistakes compound and defaults begin to climb.
The UPI integration is a potential differentiator—assuming it delivers. Credit on UPI has been slower to take off than many in the industry expected, partly due to consumer confusion and partly because the use cases don't always map cleanly onto existing spending habits. Novio's reward stacking is clever on paper. Whether it's sufficient to shift behavior at scale remains an open question.
Still, these are not first-time founders swinging for the fences on a single consumer app. They built TranServ during the payments wave, sold it, and regrouped to build Credilio during the credit wave. They have a B2B moat, a thesis about underserved credit demand in India's tier-two and tier-three cities, and now a ₹100 crore war chest to test that thesis at a larger scale.
The next 18 months will reveal whether 5 million cards is a credible target or just a number that sounded good in a pitch deck.
