Govindarajan and the story of Perfios…

Perfios raised $229M at a valuation of $900M, deepening its expansion in North America and Europe.

Born to a schoolteacher father and a homemaker mother, V.R Govindarajan did his Masters from the USA. After Working at IBM and DEC, he decided to come back to India, and set up Aztec software in 1996.

Aztec built in India, for the world. In 2000, it was listed on the bourses. By 2008, MindTree acquired Aztec, and Govindrajan was onto his next adventure.

Along with his Aztec colleague Chakraborty, the duo sought a tool that provided a single dashboard of their finances. The mission? To enable retail individuals to consolidate and manage their portfolios and debt in an automated manner.

Personal Finance One Stop (Perfios) v1.0 was born.

But monetising was difficult. India had only 93 million internet users then, and the consumers were not willing to pay for a personal finance management tool. Perfios turned to CAs and wealth managers to push their product, but to no avail.

That’s when it decided to go B2B. Perfios added an analysis layer on top of the existing product and took it to the banks. By 2016, it had >50 enterprise customers. By 2017, it had raised its Series A.

Today Perfios has 300 customers, is a soonicorn, closed FY22 with ₹136 Cr revenue, with FY23 revenue projections doubling to ₹270 Cr.