Daybreak - Cred’s first profitable quarter comes with a trade-off. No, not Kunal Shah

Episode Date: July 15, 2026

Cred just reported its first profitable quarter. Meta invested 8,500 crore rupees. And Kunal Shah walked out the door.Eight years of questions about Cred's business model ended the moment it finally had answers. The design-first, exclusivity-obsessed fintech that rewarded creditworthy Indians with gold credit cards now makes most of its money from lending — the same way every other UPI app does.Shah left for WhatsApp. Meta needed someone who could monetise a billion Indian users without making regulators nervous. What that means for both companies is the more interesting question.Scripted by Snigdha Sharma based on the report by Suprita Anupam.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

If you have a credit card, chances are credit has tried to win you over at some point. Maybe it paid your bill and gave you a cash back. Maybe it just impressed you with how good the app looked. And if you're like most people, you've probably also wondered how do they even make money? Kunal Shah had been battling that question for most of Kred's lifetime. What exactly was the business model? What was Cread all about? And to be fair, these doubts did make sense.

So, the man spent eight years tackling them. Here was an app built for a small slice of creditworthy Indians. But at the same time, it felt more like a lifestyle product than a fintech tool. Then came the morning of June 22nd. Shah announced that Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp would invest roughly 8,500 crore rupees in Kred. Around the same time, Kredd reported its first ever profitable quarter. And that's exactly when Shah decided to leave.

The founder of India's most argued about fintech stepped away from daily operations and went to WhatsApp, the world's largest messaging app. He keeps a stake of less than 10% in the company he built. behind him, CRED finally has money in the bank and a working business. But the new boss's job has very little to do with the ideas CRED was first founded on. So, first, what does CRED look like without its founder? And second, why did a giant like META need a fintech founder from Bangal this badly? Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken.

I'm your host, Trey Tahrirkees, and every day of the week, my co-host, Nickta Sharma and I will bring you one new story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Thursday, the 16th of July. Let's start with the deal itself. Of the 8,500 croreeper, Mata put in, about 5,100 crore went into the company. The rest went to existing investors through a secondary sale. Cred's cash reserves jumped from around 1,400 croreep to 6,000. 500 crore. Meta walks away with a 20% stake, making it CRED's largest minority investor ahead of QED and peak 15. Shah stays on as a shareholder with less than 10% equity. But operationally, he's out.

Maitain Sampat, who has run strategy and finance at CRED since 2020, takes over as interim CEO. And he's expected to keep the job. The timing does look deliberate. CRED just reported its first profitable quarter. In FI.25, it earned over 2,700 crore rupees in operating revenue up by 16% from the year before. Operating losses have to around 300 crore and in FI26, revenue grew to nearly 3,200 crore rupees. Monthly transatlantic users went from about 13 million to 17 million. And through all of that growth, marketing spills.

stayed flat at around $450 crore a year. The company has been debt-free for almost its entire life. So, CRED is finally a business. But look closer at what kind of business it has become. When Shaw started CRED, the idea was simple and a little audacious. Reward the credit worthy. The app was built for people who paid their credit card bills on time. It felt like a lifestyle product.

One investor told the Ken that it was a design that first made them believe in the product seriousness. Shah leaned into that exclusivity. At a press conference in September 2025, he said that candidate's resumes wouldn't even be considered at credit if their civil score was below $7.50. The company launched Kred Sovereign and invited-only credit card made from 18-carat gold. But design does not pay the bills. Lending does. And today, roughly half of TRED's revenue comes from lending-related fees and interest. Over 30% comes from payments and bill processing.

The rest is insurance and other commissions. In other words, Tread makes money the way every other UPI app makes money. And people in the Fintech world have noticed. Rajendra Rele, co-founder of the insuretech firm Autolex, told the Ken that Kred's real USP was a design experience. and that the company has failed to maintain that distinction. His verdict on the after day cluttered. The lifestyle experiments do back him up.

Credit Escape, the curated premium travel feature, was shut down in January. Happy, the corporate travel startup credit acquired for $180 million was sold to make my trip for less than $12 million. That sale triggered a large goodwill right down from around $1,200 crore rupees, to almost 500 crore in FY25. CRED chose profitability over distinctiveness. It worked. And its founder left the moment it did. So what does CRED look like without Kunal Shah?

Stay tuned. One investor put it straight. Think of Sampat as the Tim Cook to Shah's Steve jobs. Less innovation, more operations. His mandate is to make CRED IPO ready. The board is called. already working on the leadership structure for that. And the raw material is there.

CRED's lending book has crossed 24,000 crore rupees in assets under management. Its acquisitions of Spenny in 2023 and Cuvera in 2024 brought stock broking and investment advisor licenses. Kuwera alone manages nearly 33,000 crore rupees for about 300,000 investors. Through credit money, the company wants to pull a cuter. customer's entire financial life into one place. Provident fund, pension, mutual funds, gold, silver, fixed deposits, sovereign gold bonds are also coming next. CRED is also spawning separate apps. In June, it launched cash by credit for personal loans.

In April, it revamped the Covara app for SIPs and wealth management. Samir Mehta, who's the chief marketing officer at the brokerage, Phi Pesa, believes that stock, and SIPs are the natural next step, because UPI has already solved KRED's old engagement problem. Now, flip to the other side of the deal, because meta's situation is arguably more desperate than KREDS ever was. Reality Labs, Mark Zuckerberg's AR and AI bet burn through $21 billion in 2025 to generate less than $2 billion in revenue. Meta's net income has shrunk. Add impressions and ad revenue in Asia declined last quarter. And here's the part that matters for this story.

India is Meta's largest user base and it contributes very little to Meta's income. WhatsApp, the most valuable distribution asset in the country, has never been properly monetized. Add to that, a lawsuit pending before the Supreme Court of India, an order from the Competition Commission and data localization rules on the horizon. Meta needed someone who could build revenue in India, while navigating regulators without drama. Shah fits that description. CRED has publicly clarified that no user data will be shared with meta.

But the strategic possibilities are hard to ignore. The investor, my colleague, the Ken reporter Subrataabam spoke to, pointed to targeted ad space and meta pay. And also WhatsApp use cases built around CRED coins. Shah built companies from 0 to 1 and from 1 to 1. 100. At WhatsApp, the job starts at 10,000. Whether the exclusivity first instinct that built credit survives inside the most inclusive app on the planet is worth watching. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're

listening to is just a small sample of our subscriber-only offerings. A full subscription offers daily long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the Ken website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague Rachel Vargis and edited by Rajiv Sien.