Nakul Kumar Built Cashify Into a ₹1,980 Crore Pre-IPO Company by Never Breaking One Rule
What India's leading refurbished phone marketplace can teach founders about salary discipline, ESOPs, and why the best hire sometimes walks in to sell you something you can't afford.
In 2014, Nakul Kumar and his co-founders were working out of a rented desk in a Gurgaon co-working space - no brand, no tech team, and a business model that confused investors for years. Today, with ICICI Securities, JM Financial, and Nomura appointed as IPO bankers in March 2026, Cashify stands at ₹1,980 Crore in valuation, ₹1,096 Crore in FY25 revenue, and 1,684 employees across factories, 250+ retail stores, and a 200-person technology function. The question worth asking is not how they got here, but what they refused to do along the way.
I sat down with Nakul on the podcast to pull apart the actual mechanics of how Cashify built its people, culture, and ownership architecture. What came through was less a playbook and more a set of convictions, held tightly for over a decade.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
The Hire That Started Everything - and the Rule That Followed
The origin story of Cashify’s first sales hire is, in many ways, the clearest expression of how Nakul thinks about talent. A sales representative came in to pitch a monster.com subscription. The founders couldn’t afford it. They hired the rep instead.
We couldn’t afford a monster.com subscription, but we made him an offer. We really liked his sales presentation, the way he was pitching to us. From the next month, he was with us.
The logic is simple but rarely practiced: the most reliable signal of a good salesperson is how they sell to you, under real conditions. No recruitment fee, no sourcing algorithm. The funnel ran the other way.
This approach defined Cashify’s first several years. Technicians, call center staff, logistics workers, the IT guy from the same co-working space. Nakul personally interviewed every one of the company’s first 200 to 250 employees - not as a founder ego exercise, but because the HR function didn’t exist yet.
And when the hiring market in NCR went sideways in 2016 and 2017, with Paytm and Snapdeal putting “We’re Hiring” billboards on highways and offering inflated packages to any engineer they could find, Nakul held his salary bands.
I’ve never seen anyone’s salary stay hidden from anyone. I don’t know how it leaks, but everybody knows. You can never build an organization where people doing the same work are paid at different levels. I’ve tried to abide by that for ten years.
The discipline extends to the offer stage. If a candidate’s expectations exceed the budget for a role, the offer is withdrawn. Not negotiated down. Withdrawn. An underpaid hire who accepted a compromise walks in demotivated on day one, and that cost compounds fast.
The ₹1 Lakh Decision and the Culture It Built
When Cashify started pushing for more female workers in its Noida factory, the warehouse manager surfaced a problem: no female washrooms, no female security guards. Fixing it properly would cost roughly ₹1 lakh per month in additional OPEX.
Nakul approved it.
It would hit our P&L. But the next warehouse we built, we already provisioned everything - because we knew it would work long term.
The factory now runs at 22% female workforce, with a stated target of 50-50. The case Nakul makes is operational, not just principled. Female workers at Cashify have shown higher output, stronger attention to detail in device diagnostics, and lower attrition. The infrastructure cost paid back through the workforce.
The same logic applies to how Cashify thinks about internal mobility. Nakul treats mistakes as a measure of organizational health, not a failing.
If you’re not making enough mistakes, you’re not taking enough risk. And if you’re not taking enough risk, you don’t have ownership - you’re just doing a job.
This isn’t abstract. Cashify’s current retail head started as a regional bulk sales head. He raised his hand in a meeting to take on retail in the South, delivered, and grew into the national role. The HR head before him moved from a non-revenue function into running the retail division entirely, because he wanted P&L responsibility. Both were given six months to a year to break things before an AOP was built around their function.
Nakul also openly advises employees not to stay beyond three to five years. “Anything beyond that is unfair to the company and to the employee. You stop learning. You get into a comfort zone.” The people who have stayed longer at Cashify did so because they kept evolving, not because they got comfortable.
The ESOP Truth Nobody Says Out Loud
India’s startup ecosystem wants to believe employees will trade cash for equity. Nakul’s decade of data says otherwise.
I have not seen a single person say ‘give me less cash and more options.’ When we’ve offered a choice between a 10% cash increment and shares worth 20%, people choose the cash. Every time.
Cashify doesn’t use ESOPs to offset below-market salaries. They use equity in two specific ways: as alignment grants for senior lateral hires from large corporates, and as top-up retention grants for proven mid-level performers after one to two years of tenure. Nakul’s $1 million ESOP buyback in 2021, which allowed employees to liquidate up to 35% of their vested options, changed something. After people saw real cash, the conversation around equity shifted permanently.
As Cashify moves toward a public listing, that conversation will shift again. SEBI’s June 2025 Regulation 9A now explicitly protects founder equity through the promoter reclassification process at IPO, provided grants were made at least 12 months before the board’s listing decision. For a founding team that has been building for over a decade, it arrived at exactly the right moment.
The Cashify story is not about a single funding breakthrough or a viral product moment. It’s about twelve years of holding a line - on salaries, on hiring standards, on what ownership actually means - through every cycle where someone else was raising more money and moving faster.
Nakul’s parting advice, the thing he says nobody listens to:
Just interview more for any role. Don’t settle. Talk to people, meet them in person. We as a generation are losing our physical touch, and it matters enormously when you’re hiring.
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Until next time,
Your Host,
Satish Mugulavalli