There is a familiar script in India’s technology industry: engineers leave for the US, build careers in multinational companies and stay on. VR Govindarajan chose the opposite path. He gave up his job overseas and returned to India with a simple ambition — to build products instead of being part of the country’s growing outsourcing industry. Three decades later, that decision has culminated in Perfios, one of the country’s largest financial data intelligence companies, whose software today powers credit assessment, underwriting and financial workflows for banks, NBFCs and fintechs across markets.
Govindarajan grew up in Chennai in the home of a school teacher where discussions often revolved around philosophy and Hindu scriptures. After studying at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, he came back convinced that India could create technology products of its own.
His first entrepreneurial attempt, with friends Rajesh Jain and Sanjay Jain, came in 1991 when the trio tried to build a multimedia database. The idea arrived too early. Internet speeds of just 22.4 kbps meant the product simply could not work in the environment of the day.
The next venture, Aztec Software, also began as a bootstrapped product company developing enterprise middleware similar in concept to IBM’s WebSphere. But building the technology turned out to be easier than selling it. Drawing on their expertise in database systems, Aztec began building components for companies such as Microsoft, Oracle and IBM.
“Our background was hardcore database technology. We started building parts of database systems for companies like Microsoft, Oracle and IBM. That eventually became outsourced product engineering,” Govindarajan says.
Aztec listed on the stock exchanges in 2000 before being acquired by Ashok Soota-led Mindtree in 2008 for about $100 million. The exit provided experience, but Govindarajan felt there was unfinished business. Along with former Aztec colleague Debashish Chakraborty, he set out to build another product company, this time around personal finance.
Perfios, short for Personal Finance One Stop, started in 2008 as a consumer platform that aggregated financial information scattered across bank accounts, investment statements, scanned documents and other records into a single digital view.
“The goal was to build a technology-driven, category-creating and globally relevant product company in personal finance,” Govindarajan says.
Early believers, including Junglee co-founder Ashish Gupta and PS Pai of the Murugappa Group, backed the venture. Over the first seven years, the company spent barely Rs 15 crore, and neither Govindarajan nor Chakraborty drew a salary.
Perfios adopted a freemium approach, but only around 4% of users upgraded to paid versions. Attempts to reposition the platform for independent financial advisers, chartered accountants and wealth managers also failed to generate meaningful scale.
Early Pivots
The turning point came when the founders stopped thinking of Perfios as a consumer finance platform and began looking at it as a financial data infrastructure company. “We realised real-time data aggregation could become a credit underwriting tool,” Govindarajan says. “Different banks follow different credit assessment models and we could generate the required analysis instantly.” Delivered through the cloud on a pay-per-use basis, the platform also eliminated the need for banks to invest in expensive infrastructure.
Even then, adoption was slow. In the late 2000s, most banks did not see fragmented financial data as a major operational problem. Competition was limited, customer acquisition costs were low and lenders were comfortable waiting for documents to arrive through traditional processes.
The market eventually changed in Perfios’ favour. The rise of fintech companies altered banks’ expectations around speed and customer experience. Digital transformation became a strategic priority across financial institutions. The rapid expansion of digital public infrastructure through Jan Dhan accounts, Aadhaar and mobile connectivity generated unprecedented volumes of digital financial data. “We were the only company with a relevant product. Suddenly all the banks were calling us,” Govindarajan recalls.
Today, Perfios provides technology across the lending lifecycle, from customer onboarding and underwriting to fraud detection, compliance and analytics. It processes around 2.2 billion transactions annually and has expanded its capabilities through a series of acquisitions that filled gaps across its product portfolio.
The business has also attracted marquee investors including Warburg Pincus, Bessemer Venture Partners and Kedaara Capital. In its latest funding round, Perfios entered the unicorn club with a valuation of about $1.2 billion, underscoring the growing strategic importance of financial data infrastructure as banks and fintechs digitise their operations. For Govindarajan, the outcome is less about valuation than validation. And today, he certainly has much more time to indulge in his favourite pastime – listening to Carnatic music.
