How Ashish Goyal Built Fibe Into a Billion-Dollar Fintech Without a Tech Co-Founder
While competitors burned cash in Bangalore, this Pune-based CFO compounded profits by refusing every startup playbook - and created India's most profitable lending unicorn
There are no corner offices at Fibe’s Pune headquarters. No executive floor. No mahogany desks behind frosted glass doors. The CFO of this billion-dollar fintech unicorn, Ashish Goyal, sits at a workstation identical to the 23-year-old junior analyst three feet away.
Even today I don’t have a cabin. I sit on the floor along with everybody else, do my work. Nobody in the company has a cabin.
This isn’t theatre. It’s the physical architecture of a company that has achieved what most Indian fintechs couldn’t: actual profitability. Four consecutive years of it. Revenue jumped 107% from ₹392 crore to ₹812 crore between FY23 and FY24. Net profit exploded 1,770% in the same period, from ₹5.4 crore to ₹101 crore. The company now serves over 3 million customers with Assets Under Management of ₹4,429 crore, maintaining credit costs around 8% despite 90% AUM growth.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
The Blessing of Not Knowing
In 2015, when Ashish and co-founder Akshay Mehrotra decided to start a lending company, they violated fintech’s first commandment: neither had a coding background. Ashish was a Chartered Accountant and former Chief Investment Officer at Bajaj Allianz. Akshay brought marketing expertise from Future Group and PolicyBazaar. Between them, zero lines of production code. Zero experience in retail credit underwriting.
The industry whispered concerns. Every serious fintech had at least one IIT graduate. How could you disrupt banking without a technical co-founder?
Ashish saw it differently.
I think that was a blessing in disguise, to be honest. Both of us came with ideas which if 10-15 years of experience could have negated them.
Domain expertise, he realized, can be baggage. Veterans came loaded with assumptions about what was possible. Ashish had something else: “childish curiosity” - the ability to see patterns that 15-year experience had trained people not to notice.
The pattern was absurdly simple. Young salaried employees lived a monthly cycle banks ignored. Flush after payday. Stretching mid-month. Scrambling or borrowing informally in the final stretch. It wasn’t a credit problem. It was cash flow timing.
That point in time, if somebody asked me to write a 50 crore check, it is a small check for me. From there, I’m coming down and thinking of distributing 50,000 rupee.
The name “EarlySalary” came from a casual conversation. Someone said “so you want people to take their salary early” and Ashish immediately flipped it into a brand. No agencies. No committees. Minutes, not months.
But the tech gap still needed solving. His answer: hire a CTO and Head of Risk Analytics as employees, not co-founders. The logic was structural - you can find talent if you build the right systems, but you can’t fix a diluted cap table.
You can always find talent if you know what right systems to build, what are the right ways to persevere and how do you really ensure that you have the right tracking mechanism.
Ten years later, that Head of Risk Analytics is still at Fibe, now as CEO of the NBFC arm. The early CTO built the entire proprietary tech stack - loan origination systems, mobile apps, analytics - before moving on. The gamble paid off.
The Pune Advantage and the Culture Machine
While tech was being built, Ashish made a second contrarian bet: Pune over Bangalore. Everyone said he was wrong. Bangalore had the ecosystem, the talent density, the venture capital.
It also had a culture he found toxic.
In Bangalore, the attrition rates are, whatever story I hear is quite high. There is a saying that in the lunchtime people go and give interviews.
Pune offered loyalty. Global banks (Citi, Barclays, Credit Suisse) had technology centers there. Bajaj and insurers had data science teams. But no 500 startups competing for the same 5,000 engineers in a bidding war that rewarded mercenaries.
Ashish also rejected the “tribe hiring” common in tech - leaders bringing entire former teams.
I generally don’t like tribes following as a founder purely because you get all single-minded people with the same kind of thought process.
He wanted diversity - people from insurance, banking, retail, creating cognitive friction rather than groupthink. He screened for “hunger” over pedigree, asking if candidates could “replace their own boss” in three years.
The retention validated the thesis. One early hire recently completed ten years at a 10.5-year-old company.
The “no cabin” policy serves multiple functions. In lending, the feedback loop between collections and risk modeling must be instant. Physical proximity eliminates latency. But deeper, it’s psychological. It screens against “entitlement coefficient” - people resting on past laurels.
Ashish built a culture that accepts failure as inevitable in risk businesses. The response to errors determines whether people hide problems or surface them early.
It is always that how do you really go every day and do things is the culture, what will determine your company.
His definition: culture is what you do habitually, not what you say in meetings. The test: maintaining 100-person culture at 1,000 employees. Fibe passed.
The Numbers and the Evolution
The company that started offering salary advances now operates across four categories: personal loans (instant, mobile-first), education loans (6-24 month courses banks ignore), healthcare financing (point-of-care at hospitals), and travel financing.
The healthcare insight came from frustration.
It is much easier to get a mobile phone financing in two minutes, but it is very, very tough to do healthcare funding.
A parent needing IIT coaching for their child has no options. A 30-year-old can’t finance dermatology treatment. Banks optimized for high-ticket secured lending and ignored these “small” needs. Fibe built the rails.
The financial trajectory defied the sector’s “growth at all costs” narrative. Between 2015 and 2023, Indian fintechs raised over $30 billion, mostly burned chasing monopoly scale. Most are now dead or zombified.
Fibe raised approximately $266 million total - a fraction of peers - and built profitability from early days. The thinking: if unit economics don’t work at small scale, volume won’t fix them.
Valuations reflected fundamental strength: ~$300 million (Series D, 2022), ~$600 million (Series E, 2024), crossing $1 billion (Series F, 2025 with $35 million from IFC).
The risk-first doctrine drives this. Ashish repeats an old finance saying: “You need to talk about risk. Growth numbers need to be seen, not talked.”
Most of the fintechs who did not succeed or could not make it, most of the time falters on the business side, not on the tech side.
Elegant algorithms mean nothing if you underwrite badly or collect poorly. The math is unforgiving.
The target: India’s aspirational middle - salaried employees earning ₹25,000 to ₹75,000 monthly, underserved by traditional banking. Ashish uses telecom as analogy. In 2005, analysts predicted max 200 million mobile phones in India. Today: 160 crore phones for 140 crore people.
His projection: the next decade will be “much more vibrant, stronger and very, very much diversified” for aspirational consumption. Fibe is building the financial infrastructure for that wave.
The Twenty-Year Game
When asked about milestones, Ashish’s answer reveals his time horizon.
Personally, I’m here for 20 years. With that piece, I’ll build the company. So there will be three, six, 12 months when we might slow down, but we will build the company with a very, very long-term objective.
This isn’t the language of founders optimizing for a five-year exit. It’s institution-building. The implication: Fibe can absorb short-term volatility that forces competitors into panic. The company survived 2023’s brutal fintech downturn precisely because it wasn’t dependent on the next round to cover losses.
Fibe’s journey demonstrates you can build sustainable lending in India without burning capital on customers you’ll never profit from. It proves thoughtful location strategy creates advantage through loyalty and cost structure. It shows culture, defined as “what you do habitually,” can scale without dilution.
Most importantly, it validates a different definition of fintech: not a technology company doing lending, but a financial services company using technology as an enabling layer. The distinction changes where you focus, how you hire, what you measure, and whether you survive.
For now, the CFO continues sitting on the floor with everyone else in Pune, reviewing credit models and approving loans for coaching classes and medical treatments. The cabin-less office keeps humming. The profits keep compounding. And somewhere in Bangalore, competitors with better pedigrees and bigger war chests wonder how they missed this.
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Satish Mugulavalli