By the time Saurabh Jain began thinking seriously about his next startup, the fintech ecosystem had already been crowded by products built around equities and mutual funds. Yet a far larger pool of household savings continued to sit in a familiar, decades-old instrument: fixed deposits. For Jain, that gap, between where innovation was flowing and where money
actually rested, became the core idea behind Stable Money.
Making of a Fintech Founder
The insight was shaped by a long apprenticeship across consumer internet and financial services. Jain grew up in Aurangabad and entered IIT Bombay in 2006 to study metallurgy. The early years were difficult. “The first year was a struggle,” he says, but the exposure and networks the campus offered proved formative. After graduating, his first job in 2010 at a trading firm promised `9 lakh a year and delivered `25,000 a month. He quit within five months and returned home, before landing at Fractal Analytics later that year, where he experienced a more structured workplace.
Over the next four-and-a-half years, including a stint in Geneva, Jain worked on supply-chain optimisation for FMCG companies. By 2014, however, the startup ecosystem was accelerating, Jain felt increasingly disconnected from it. He resigned again, this time deliberately, to build his own company.
That first venture, Truce (True Price), aimed to streamline agricultural supply chains by sourcing directly from farmers and supplying restaurants. On paper, the logic worked. On the ground, it did not. The agri supply chain, Jain realised, was inefficient but economically coherent. Labour for sorting and packaging at APMC mandis could cost as little as Rs 20 an hour, making replication hard. Quality was the only lever Truce could pull, and most restaurants were unwilling to pay for it.
Long working capital cycles compounded the problem. After two years and roughly `2.5–3 crore raised, the founders shut the company. The decision was pragmatic, though tinged with regret, especially after a competitor was later acquired by Zomato and became Hyperpure.
In 2017, Jain joined Swiggy through an acqui-hire, just after the company raised a billion dollars. There, he encountered scale in its rawest form. He worked on growth and expansion as Swiggy moved from a handful of cities to nearly 500, at times launching in seven cities a day. As chief of staff to then COO Vivek Sundar, Jain observed how large organisations think about hiring, systems and execution.
A deeper shift came in 2021 at Navi, where Jain worked as chief of staff to Sachin Bansal and later headed Navi Mutual Fund. He helped push low-cost, passive investing and launched products such as Rs 10 SIPs, alongside adjacent businesses like health insurance. But by 2023, despite the breadth of exposure, he felt there was unfinished work. In July that year, he quit and began building Stable Money with longtime friend and finance professional Harish Reddy.
The original plan was to sell corporate bonds. Early user conversations quickly challenged that assumption. Bonds were poorly understood. Fixed deposits, by contrast, were searched for nearly three million times a month and carried deep trust. Stable Money pivoted even before launch. “Large money still sits in fixed income and there has been no real innovation in the space for five to ten years,” Jain says.
The company went live in August 2023 as an online FD marketplace, initially partnering with small finance banks that typically offer higher rates than large commercial lenders. The early response exceeded expectations. Within a month, Stable Money was seeing `30 crore in monthly FD inflows – then the scale of the country’s largest online FD platform.
Today, the platform handles around Rs 430 crore in monthly inflows and has built a cumulative book of about Rs 4,000 crore. It employs roughly 170 people. Financially, Stable Money clocks close to $3 million in annual recurring revenue, less than two years into operations — a marker Jain sees as evidence that the model has moved past its most fragile phase.
Tier-2 Pivot
One of the more telling signals has been the user base. About 60% of customers come from tier 2 and tier 3 cities. These are savers with long-standing faith in fixed deposits but limited exposure to digital distribution, often influenced by YouTube creators rather than traditional advisors.
Over the past year, Stable Money has expanded beyond FDs into corporate bonds, gold and silver funds, and most recently, FD-backed credit cards. The product additions are incremental rather than disruptive, mirroring Jain’s broader thesis that fixed income does not need reinvention so much as better access and packaging.
“It’s hard to see progress in day-to-day problems,” Jain says. “But when I zoom out, it feels like we have come a long way. From a point where there was no conviction around FDs, we have become closely associated with them. When people think of fixed deposits, they think of Stable Money.”