Co-founder, OfBusiness | Co-founder and CEO, Oxyzo | Founded 2015–16 | Gurugram
Most unicorn stories begin with a big idea and a bigger fundraise. Ruchi Kalra’s begins with a spreadsheet and a simple question: does this make money?
She has spent the last decade building two companies that answer yes. OfBusiness, which she co-founded, helps small manufacturers buy raw materials. Oxyzo, the lending company she co-founded and runs, gives those businesses the working capital they need. Both are valued at over $1 billion. Oxyzo has been profitable from the start.
IIT, ISB and nine years at McKinsey
Ruchi studied engineering at IIT Delhi and later did her MBA at the Indian School of Business (ISB). Before consulting, she worked at Evalueserve, the research and analytics firm.
She then joined McKinsey & Company in New Delhi, where she spent about nine years, much of it advising banks and financial institutions. She rose to become a partner, one of the firm’s most senior roles.
In 2007, McKinsey put her on the same real-estate project as a colleague named Asish Mohapatra, an IIT Kharagpur and ISB graduate from Cuttack, Odisha. For about two years, their relationship was mostly weekend meetings. They married in 2009.
“We both had an itch”
By 2015, both had long, successful corporate careers. Asish had moved from McKinsey to Matrix Partners, where he invested in consumer and pharma companies. Ruchi was a partner at McKinsey. And both of them were restless.
“We both had an itch to go out and build something,” she told Bloomberg.
They were not alone. Three other professionals joined them: Bhuvan Gupta, Vasant Sridhar and Nitin Jain. Between them, the five founders had worked at McKinsey, ITC, Religare, RBS and Snapdeal. “All of us had gained several years of corporate life and experiences, and were done with it,” Ruchi told HerStory.
There was one more thing happening at the time. Ruchi was expecting her first child, a daughter. The company and the baby arrived almost together. “We always joke that we had twins,” she told Business Today in 2026.
She has always credited her co-founders for making that possible. “When we started, I was expecting, and the reason I was able to do what I could do was because of the founding team,” she said, adding that they “showed great empathy and support.”
The problem in India’s factories
OfBusiness launched in Gurugram around the turn of 2016. Its idea was rooted in a problem the founders had seen up close: India’s small and mid-sized manufacturers.
These businesses, which make everything from steel fabrications to processed food, buy raw materials such as steel, diesel, foodgrains and industrial chemicals in large volumes. They often struggle on two fronts at once. Buying is fragmented and inefficient, and credit is hard to get. Banks are slow and ask for heavy paperwork. Informal lenders are fast but expensive.
OfBusiness offered to solve both. A small manufacturer could buy raw materials through the platform, with credit attached. Matrix Partners put in seed capital, and OfBusiness turned a profit within about 15 months, according to Fortune.
Starting Oxyzo
Six months after OfBusiness began, the founders set up a separate lending company, so that the credit side of the business could stand on its own. Oxyzo Financial Services was incorporated in 2016, received its non-banking financial company (NBFC) licence from the Reserve Bank of India in 2017, and began lending in November that year. Ruchi became its CEO.
Her years advising financial institutions at McKinsey shaped how she built it. Oxyzo lends working capital to small businesses, mostly to help them buy raw materials. Because OfBusiness saw what these companies bought, how often, and how they paid, Oxyzo started with an unusual advantage: it knew its borrowers.
It grew carefully. Oxyzo was profitable almost from the beginning; Fortune reported it was profitable within 30 days. Its bad loans stayed around 1% even through the Covid years. Over time, it expanded well beyond OfBusiness’s own customers. By 2022, Ruchi said, more than 70% of Oxyzo’s lending was to companies outside OfBusiness.
“We wanted to be capital efficient and focus on profitability,” she told YourStory.
Two unicorns in one home
In July 2021, OfBusiness raised $160 million in a round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and became a unicorn. By December that year, it was valued at about $5 billion.
Then, on 24 March 2022, Oxyzo announced it had raised $200 million in its Series A, its very first institutional round, led by Alpha Wave with Tiger Global, Norwest Venture Partners, Matrix Partners and Creation Investments. The round valued Oxyzo at $1 billion. Its loan book was about $350 million and doubling every year.
Bloomberg and Fortune described Ruchi and Asish as India’s first husband-and-wife pair to have each built a unicorn. Niren Shah of Norwest went further, congratulating Ruchi “on becoming the first female founder in India of a profitable, fintech unicorn.”
Ruchi was quick to share the credit. “It is about teamwork,” she told Business Standard. “All five of us have worked hard on these two entities.”
On working with her husband, she has a simple rule: “respect for the complementarity” and “love for the similarity.” Asish has called them “yin and yang,” and admits the line between work and home is “very, very blurred.” They share caregiving for their daughter.
A lender that kept its discipline
What happened after the funding is, in some ways, the more remarkable part of the story. Many startups that raise large rounds spend quickly. Oxyzo kept to the same discipline.
Its loan book grew from about ₹2,555 crore in March 2022 to over ₹10,500 crore by March 2026, serving more than one lakh small businesses across more than 70 industrial clusters in over 20 states. Its profit grew every year, reaching ₹375 crore in FY26. Its gross bad loans fell to 0.74%. CRISIL rates it A+.
“Capital is scarce,” Ruchi said in 2026, explaining the company’s caution. She has also said she does not chase valuations: “Valuation is determined by the market.” OfBusiness, meanwhile, reported a profit of ₹724 crore in FY26 and is preparing to go public.
On women, bias and asking for help
Ruchi speaks openly about the barriers women put up for themselves. “We as women ourselves introduce the biases in our minds by choosing the sector,” she told HerStory, and “as women, we sometimes do not call out and ask for help.”
Her advice to women who doubt themselves is short. “Just look at the mirror and say, ‘I am good enough’.”
In April 2026, she received the Express Award for Women Entrepreneurs, given by the Financial Express with FICCI FLO.
For Ruchi, the point of all this is not the money. “Real wealth creation is creating an enterprise and leaving a legacy,” she said in 2026, “something that has a life of its own beyond you.”
Founder Journeys is a Sakhi Sangini series telling the stories of women who built businesses in India. This story is based on public interviews and reporting.
Sources: Fortune (April 2022); Bloomberg via Gulf News (March 2022); HerStory/YourStory (March 2022); Business Standard (March 2022); Business Today (July 2021, August 2026); CRISIL (January 2025); Inc42 (May 2026, July 2026); OfBusiness and Oxyzo company pages.
