"Lending is a collections industry. Money can be distributed easily; the core of the business is getting it back."

Before Titan

The company started with a problem the whole of Indian lending could see and almost nobody wanted to work on.

Rishabh Goel had come out of IIT Delhi and gone into risk, first at Deutsche Bank and then at BlackRock. Lending in India was growing quickly, and so was the pile of loans that were not being repaid. What struck him was not the size of the pile but the machinery for dealing with it, which had not changed in decades. Recovery ran on posted letters, spreadsheets, call-centre scripts and legal notices drafted one at a time. Lenders had no way of telling which borrowers were able to pay and which were not, so they treated everyone the same way. A large amount of recoverable money was written off each year because nobody had the tools to go and ask for it properly.

Credgenics began in 2018, founded by three people who had each come at the problem from a different side. Rishabh had watched it from inside a bank. Anand Agrawal, also from IIT Delhi, had built product and engineering at early-stage companies and knew what it took to put a system in front of an institution. Mayank Khera was a lawyer, which matters more than it sounds: a large part of recovery is legal process, and legal process is not something you can learn from the outside while you build.

The bet

We invested at seed.

Venture capital in India was funding the front door of lending at the time — origination, credit cards, anything to do with getting money out. Almost nobody was funding the back door. Collections is where lenders actually protect themselves when a cycle turns, and it was the least modernised function in the sector.

The arithmetic was unusually clear for an early-stage software company. If the platform improved a lender's recovery rate by even a few percentage points, it paid for itself immediately. There was no argument to be had about whether the value existed, only about whether these three could prove it.

The shape of the founding team was the other reason. A business that is part software, part data and part legal procedure needs all three inside the room from the beginning, and that is not a common combination.

The hard part

Nobody buys enterprise software from a two-year-old company, least of all a bank.

Indian banks and NBFCs are cautious by design, and the sales cycles reflect it. Credgenics had to prove that its platform genuinely improved recovery on a real loan book before any large lender would commit, and it had to do that without the reference customers that would have made the conversation easy. Every institution had to be won individually, over months, on evidence.

The product argument was harder still. Collections in India had a reputation, and it was deserved - pressure, repetition, agents at the door. Credgenics was proposing that a more measured approach would recover more money, not less: work out who is actually able to pay, reach them on channels they use, and keep the process documented and compliant. Lenders were being asked to accept that treating borrowers better was also the commercially better option, which was not the received wisdom.

Then the argument settled itself. When the pandemic arrived, field collection stopped entirely — agents could not visit, notices could not be posted — while digital lending volumes rose. Lenders running on paper had no way to operate. A remote, automated, digital-first recovery stack stopped being an improvement and became the only thing that worked.

What it became

Credgenics reported revenue of around ₹220 crore in FY25, roughly 40 per cent up on the year before, with profit before tax of ₹25 crore and profit growing about three times faster than revenue. It has been profitable while growing, and Rishabh has said the company holds more cash than it has raised in primary equity across all its rounds.

In 2023 it raised a $50 million Series B led by WestBridge Capital, with Accel, Tanglin Venture Partners, Beams Fintech Fund and ourselves doubling down on our investment. It has since extended beyond India into Indonesia, Singapore and the Middle East, and acquired Arrise to add field collections alongside the software, covering the recovery process end to end.

The point is still 2018: the least fashionable function in Indian financial services, taken on by three people who between them actually understood it.

In their words

If you're building something before the numbers exist to prove it works, write to us at startups@titancapital.vc.