The path requires much more effort to realise the significant chances that propelled me to become India’s next unicorn leader.

My career as an entrepreneur began when my colleagues and I took a flight to Delhi after attending The National Conference. Even though they were tired from the travel, I insisted that everyone attend a music instrumental festival. But since it was month end and everyone was facing fund shortage, they declined it.

This gave me inspiration and made me believe that this suffering might be readily alleviated. The following morning the topic was introduced to Ashish Goyal, a buddy of over 12 years and now the Co-Founder and CFO of Fibe.

We visited a friend who had a small mobile app development team, where they assisted in creating a screen demo app. That Sunday, we obtained from him an NBFC licence and, in essence, started the process by raising $1.5 million in seed capital.

Today, Fibe has disbursed close to 4 million loans totalling ₹10,000 crore and has over 12 million app downloads.

We were preparing to develop an app for loans, which neither Ashish nor I had ever seen before in the Indian finance market. We were aware that we had to act quickly. We needed 96 days to finish the product and release the app.

Within the first eight months, we nearly ran out of cash. Prior to raising our next round of funds, 128 people had already rejected us. It took till the 129th and 130th attempt before we were successful. I could have quit everything at this point and gotten a nice job, but then I wouldn’t be here telling you my journey.

We started the company after a lot of hard work, hoping to expand one day. Banks took 21 days to finish the transaction (of what we are now offering) in early 2016, and consumers weren’t comfortable with this because of the lengthy turnaround.

We wanted to fill this gap and after much effort, we have developed an autonomous platform for auto-decision on loans, allowing consumers to receive their funds in less than a minute. When we initially began, could I have envisioned this? Maybe not.

Over the years, I believe that we, as a company, have filled a crucial need for underserved individuals, and that this eventually changed the industry. On this note, I would like to mention that Fibe has closed its series D funding of $110 million led by TPG’s The Rise Fund and Norwest Venture Partners.

This is the largest fund-raise till date following the last financing round in 2019. After all, when we learn from our past mistakes, we have the capacity to seize glorious success. That’s the key takeaway.

The writer is Co-Founder and CEO of Fibe