Kissht's 12% premium debut is a win for the unglamorous side of lending.

Lending is built on boring things. Underwriting that holds up across cycles. Collections processes that get iterated on every quarter. A regulatory posture that takes the spirit of the law as seriously as the letter. None of it makes for a good pitch deck. All of it determines whether a lender is still standing in a decade.

Kissht, the digital lending platform run by OnEMI Technology Solutions, listed today on the NSE and BSE at a roughly 11% premium to its issue price. The ₹926 crore (~US$110M) IPO closed 9.5x oversubscribed, with QIBs subscribed nearly 25x. At the upper end of the price band, the company was valued at around US$340M.

What that result reflects, more than anything, is an eight-year operating story built on the unglamorous fundamentals.

Compliance first, by choice

When Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India first invested in Kissht in late 2018, the digital lending space in India was crowded. Through 2017 and 2018, more than fifty companies were attacking the opportunity in some form, and the regulatory regime around digital credit was still being written.

Kissht made a choice early that most of its cohort did not. The company committed to operating an NBFC, Si Creva, from the outset, and to staying compliant with both the letter and the spirit of every regulation that applied to it. In a market where shortcuts on compliance often looked like growth, this was the slower path. It was also the one that survived.

Collections, not just underwriting

The team had best-in-class underwriting from early on. But Ranvir Singh and Krishnan Vishwanathan understood something that takes most lenders a cycle or two to learn: the real durability of a credit business lives on the back end. Collections. Credit-cost discipline. The unglamorous side of the loan lifecycle.

Every aspect of collections at Kissht has been iterated on and rebuilt over the years, backed by relentless execution. It is the kind of work that does not generate headlines, and the kind that determines everything.

A crisis sequence that tested both

Almost immediately after Vertex's investment, IL&FS defaulted, triggering a liquidity crunch across India's NBFC sector. Then came COVID, which forced new disbursements close to zero while a regulator-mandated moratorium paused collections. Then a wave of regulatory tightening reshaped the co-lending market, which, in hindsight, was a blessing in disguise for operators built on compliance.

Through each shock, Kissht iterated the business model. From purchase-backed financing at retail, to a purely digital personal finance app, and more recently into secured lending. The product evolved. The discipline did not.

Piyush Kharbanda, General Partner at Vertex Ventures SEA & India and a Kissht board member since 2018, recalls a Zoom call early in COVID, when the first ramifications of the pandemic were just being felt and the founders were planning to halt fresh disbursements. He offered a comment he thought might help. The pushback from Ranvir and Krishnan was instant. Kissht would not optimise for the near term. The company was being built for a very large outcome, and any compromise on fundamentals would foreclose that outcome long before it arrived.

That posture, more than any single strategic move, is what carried the business through.

What compounds

For the nine months ended December 2025, Kissht reported approximately US$24M in PAT on US$187M of total income, on a loan book that has scaled meaningfully while shifting toward longer-tenure, higher-quality credit. ~US$75M of the fresh issue proceeds will be infused into Si Creva to support the next phase of growth.

The team that built this has never been the flashiest employer in Indian fintech, nor the highest-paying. Many of its people have stayed for years, building the kind of institutional muscle that does not show up on a cap table but shows up in every quarter of credit performance.

Vertex's perspective

Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India backed Kissht in late 2018, alongside the Vertex Growth funds in subsequent rounds. Over eight years, the firm has worked closely with Ranvir, Krishnan, and the broader team through every cycle the business has navigated.

"Ranvir and Krishnan have truly shown me how startups should function," said Piyush. "Nimble, always evolving, and ready to take on the world."

Vertex Ventures SEA & India continues to back disruptive, scalable startups in financial services and fintech, including Recko, Signzy, IndiaP2P, Metafin, Wint Wealth, and Kiwi.