Sachin Bansal ran his fintech alone for eight years before taking anyone's money

Most startups take outside money within their first two years, sometimes their first two months. Sachin Bansal waited eight years, and funded the whole thing himself in the meantime.

On August 19, 2026, Navi, the Bengaluru-based fintech founded by Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal, announced a $100 million investment from Prosus, the global technology investor, valuing the company at roughly $1.3 billion. It's a modest number by the standards of India's biggest fintech raises. What makes it notable is what came before it: eight years without a single outside institutional investor.

The backstory.

Bansal co-founded Flipkart in 2007 and exited in 2018 when Walmart acquired a majority stake in the company for $16 billion, one of the largest e-commerce deals in history. He used a substantial chunk of his own proceeds to start Navi that same year, building a business spanning digital payments, personal lending, insurance, and mutual funds, entirely funded out of his own pocket rather than through venture capital rounds, which is how nearly every fintech competitor in India has grown.

Why that mattered until now.

Bootstrapping a fintech company through eight years, including a pandemic and a sharp global funding slowdown, without answering to outside investors gave Bansal a degree of control almost no founder at this scale retains. It also meant Navi grew more conservatively at times than venture-backed rivals willing to burn investor cash for market share. That changed in 2024, when Navi first attempted to raise external capital from institutional investors at a target valuation of around $2 billion. That round didn't materialize. The $100 million Prosus deal, arriving at a lower $1.3 billion valuation two years later, is effectively Navi's second attempt, this time successful, though at a smaller price tag than Bansal originally sought.

What Navi actually looks like today.

Its UPI payments app is now the fourth-largest in India by volume, behind PhonePe, Google Pay, and Paytm, and processed 947 million transactions worth roughly ₹483.18 billion (about $5.05 billion) in July 2026 alone. Navi Finserv, its lending arm, carries about ₹130 billion (roughly $1.4 billion) in assets under management. For the fiscal year 2026, Navi reported revenue of ₹30.91 billion (about $323 million) against a net loss of ₹4.66 billion (about $49 million), though the company says it reached consolidated profitability in the fourth quarter of FY2026.

The non-obvious part.

Taking outside money this late, and at a lower valuation than Bansal targeted two years earlier, isn't usually read as a strength. But it flips the usual fintech funding story: instead of using investor capital to subsidize early losses and chase growth, Navi is bringing in its first outside investor only once the business is close to sustainably profitable on its own. That changes the negotiating position entirely. Prosus isn't betting on an unproven idea; it's buying into a company that has already survived eight years, three business lines, and one aborted fundraise without needing anyone else's money to stay alive.

Navi's UPI app processed 947 million transactions worth roughly ₹483 billion (about $5.05 billion) in a single month, July 2026, making it India's fourth-largest UPI platform by volume.

The honest catch.

Navi previously filed for a $440 million IPO in 2022 and abandoned it in 2023 amid weak market conditions, so a second attempt now, targeting roughly $2 billion, carries the shadow of that earlier retreat. The deal also still requires regulatory approvals, including from the Competition Commission of India, so it isn't fully closed. And a fintech that only reached consolidated profitability in its most recent quarter, after eight years, took longer to get there than several of its venture-backed rivals, even if it did so without their level of investor-funded losses along the way.

Eight years of self-funding bought Sachin Bansal something venture-backed founders rarely get: the ability to bring in his first outside investor from a position of leverage, not need.