Cashfree Payments recorded a strong jump in FY26, with revenue from operations rising 51% to ₹967 crore from ₹640 crore in the previous year. At the same time, the Bengaluru-based fintech narrowed its losses by 23% to ₹119 crore, signalling better operating efficiency as the business scaled.
The company’s payment gateway business remained its biggest growth driver. Revenue from payment gateway commissions surged 85% to ₹890 crore, while payout commissions contributed ₹69 crore and cross-border payment commissions added around ₹8 crore.
Founded in 2015 by Akash Sinha and Reeju Datta, Cashfree has expanded beyond payment collections into payouts, cross-border transactions, KYC, fraud detection and other merchant-focused payment infrastructure. The company says it serves more than one million businesses and processes over $80 billion in annual payment volume.
The growth, however, also came with higher costs. Cashfree’s payment gateway processing expenses rose 66% to ₹698 crore, pushing total expenses to ₹1,091 crore in FY26. Employee benefit expenses stood at ₹239 crore, while advertising and marketing costs declined to ₹18 crore.
Despite the increase in expenses, revenue grew at a faster pace, helping the company reduce its annual loss. Cashfree’s EBITDA margin improved to negative 9.36%, indicating that while profitability is still some distance away, the company is steadily improving its operating leverage.
Cashfree has also strengthened its regulatory position, securing key RBI licences across domestic payment aggregation, cross-border payments and prepaid payment instruments. The fintech has raised around $95 million from investors including Y Combinator, Smilegate Investments, State Bank of India and Krafton.
For Cashfree, FY26 was not just about higher transaction volumes. The bigger takeaway is that the company managed to scale revenue significantly while bringing losses down — a combination that could become increasingly important as competition in India’s payments infrastructure market intensifies.
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