How Atul Shinghal Built Scripbox Into a ₹20,000 Crore Wealth Platform, and Why He's Honest About ESOPs
The Scripbox founder ran two startups at once, launched with just four mutual funds, and turned profitable before an IPO. His candid take on why most startup equity never becomes real wealth.
When a loyal employee needs cash and their stock options are still years from paying out, a lot of founders do something quietly that never makes the pitch deck: they reach into their own pockets. Atul Shinghal, founder and CEO of Scripbox, did exactly that for a former CTO, and it bothered him enough to say so out loud.
Atul has spent three decades at the intersection of finance and technology, and he has pulled off something most operators never do: he built two companies at once.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
Before Scripbox, Atul ran Probe42, a corporate-data platform the market came to call the Bloomberg terminal of India. He scaled it from 1,000 manually produced research reports a month to more than a million companies a month, purely through digitisation. He ran it for a full decade, from 2010 to 2020, alongside a second startup, until his investors at Accel forced the issue.
The VC said, are you crazy? How can one CEO run two companies? You decide.
He eventually chose Scripbox. Incorporated in 2012 and live in 2013, it now manages around ₹20,000 crore, roughly $2.4 billion, for more than a lakh families across 2,500-plus cities. FY25 was its first profitable year: ₹12.7 crore in profit on ₹107.2 crore of operating revenue, up 27 percent. In May 2026 the board cleared a raise of up to ₹170 crore, partly to prepare for an IPO, and in June it acquired Delhi-NCR advisory firm Bluechip Capital, a business its founder had run for 33 years.
Scripbox got there on a bet that looked backwards. When it launched, the market offered roughly 850 mutual fund schemes. Scripbox went out with four. Atul’s logic was that the early saver earning ₹70,000 to ₹80,000 a month, with maybe ₹10,000 to ₹20,000 to invest, had nobody to advise them, because nobody made money on that ticket. So Scripbox curated a handful of goal-based baskets and asked one or two questions to route each person to the right one. For its first eight or nine years, no human sold to you at all, only content and the product.
That same suspicion of the obvious shows up in how Atul reads his own numbers. He spent about a decade at Capital One building scorecards, which makes him an unlikely sceptic of the dashboard.
Anecdotes will beat data every day, every time.
Heatmaps tell you what people do, he says, never why. He still walks into bank branches to watch managers use Probe on screen.
Early on, Scripbox covered 65 to 70 percent of its people with stock options. But Atul is clear that ownership came less from equity than from empowerment, from telling smart hires to go get it done inside guardrails.
The problem is real and growing. Indian startups stay private for 12 to 15 years, leaving employees holding valuable but illiquid paper. By late 2024, 16 new-age companies had run ESOP buybacks worth about $148 million, Swiggy alone offering roughly $65 million at listing. Atul, who could have sold the ESOP dream, does the opposite.
ESOPs are a real wealth creator. But be objective, the success rate is less than fifty percent.
For every Flipkart or Razorpay, he points out, there is a Snapdeal, a Jabong, a Myntra. Employees often join late, at higher strike prices. And founders who want to help are boxed in.
VCs will not allow me to do a secondary, they will want me to use it for primary.
Ask Atul what actually builds wealth and the answer is deliberately unglamorous: start a ₹5,000 monthly SIP, save 20 percent of your income as a rule, and let compounding work. He’ll remind you that 95 percent of traders lose money. It is the same discipline Scripbox sells to a lakh families, and the same clear-eyed honesty he brings to equity. Scripbox is not a unicorn, and Atul doesn’t pretend it is. What he offers instead is rarer: a founder who will tell you which parts of the startup story are true, and which parts are just hope.
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Satish Mugulavalli