Indian Fintech Startup Jar Turns Profitable, Reaches 35M Users with Gold Investment App, Plans IPO for Next Year
Indian fintech startup Jar, specializing in gold investments for users, has achieved profitability by empowering millions of first-time savers to build digital gold portfolios via its app.
Instead of focusing on high-income urban consumers or credit products, the four-year-old company has gained traction by offering a culturally relevant asset – gold – as an accessible entry point into savings. The startup targets low-to-middle-income users, often overlooked by traditional financial institutions, allowing them to save in gold for as little as INR 10 ($0.11) daily.
This approach has led Jar to accumulate over 35 million registered users across 12,000 zip codes. Approximately 60% of these users hail from smaller cities and towns, and more than 95% are making their first formal savings, according to the CEO Nishchay AG.
The company’s financial performance reflects this growth momentum, with sources reporting that Jar is planning to go public next year. Financial consultants are actively engaging with the startup for its Initial Public Offering (IPO), these sources disclosed.
In fiscal year 2024, which concluded in March, Jar’s operating revenue, primarily derived from its core gold-saving app, surged ninefold to INR 2.08 billion ($23.6 million), as per the latest filings. Total revenue across all business lines during that same period increased dramatically to INR 24.50 billion (approximately $279.3 million), representing a staggering 49-fold increase from INR 500 million ($5.7 million) in the previous financial year.
This total revenue includes earnings from digital gold transactions, jewelry sales through Nek platform, and fees from third-party distribution partnerships.
Launched early last year, the Nek platform offers gold, silver, diamond, and lab-grown diamond jewelry across over 8,000 zip codes. Operating on a drop-shipment model with no inventory, it generated INR 1 billion (approximately $11 million) in annual revenue last year and has experienced steady growth since then, according to Nishchay.
Jar has reported profits after tax for the past two consecutive quarters. The company has shifted its focus by vertically integrating its operations over the past year, constructing an in-house tech stack for purchasing, storing, and managing gold directly. BDO serves as its statutory auditor, while Brinks acts as its custody partner. By controlling the entire value chain, Jar can capture a larger share of the gold market and distribute its gold through third-party platforms, including PhonePe, the Walmart-owned fintech firm.
In 2021, Jar partnered with BharatPe and Unity Small Finance Bank to facilitate digital payments directly through the Jar app using India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) system. UPI is India’s dominant digital payment network enabling instant bank-to-bank transfers via smartphones. This collaboration opens up a new revenue stream and aims to boost user engagement and retention by expanding the app’s functionality beyond just gold savings.
Jar has been an early adopter of UPI AutoPay, a feature introduced by the Indian government in 2020 for recurring payments on the UPI platform. Since Jar only supports UPI-based payments for gold savings, this feature has helped drive repeat transactions from users.
“Daily savings is our flagship feature, and that’s what most of our users utilize,” Nishchay said when asked about UPI AutoPay’s impact on the company’s growth.
The app caters to a diverse user base, including skilled professionals in IT and manufacturing, small business owners, and daily wage workers such as electricians, plumbers, carpenters, and construction laborers. The app supports nine Indian languages, enabling it to cater to users across education and income levels.
The startup has designed its app to offer a personalized experience to users, with gamification and encouragement for gold savings. The growth team continuously builds different cohorts based on various attributes and data signals such as phone usage patterns, location, language, consistent saving patterns, and more, in order to identify the consumer and tailor content accordingly.
