In India, saving with gold is not new; it is cultural. But Jar, a four-year-old fintech startup, has turned that tradition into a digital habit for millions of first-time savers. And now, it’s doing something rare in the consumer fintech world: it’s profitable.
While many fintech apps chase urban elites or pile into credit products, Jar took a different path. It made gold, the asset families already trust, the entry point to financial savings. Users can start with as little as ₹10 (about 11 cents) a day. That simple, low-barrier approach has brought in more than 35 million registered users across 12,000 zip codes. About 60% of them come from smaller towns (tier-2 and tier-3 cities), and nearly all, 95%, are saving formally for the first time.
Jar’s growth numbers explain why bankers are whispering about an IPO next year. According to its latest filings, operating revenue from its gold-saving app grew ninefold in fiscal 2024 to ₹2.08 billion ($23.6 million). Total revenue across all business lines hit ₹24.50 billion ($279.3 million), a staggering 49x jump from the previous year. And after-tax profits have been steady for the last two quarters.
That revenue is not just from gold savings. Jar now sells jewelry through its platform Nek, which offers gold, silver, diamond, and lab-grown diamond jewelry across 8,000 zip codes without holding inventory. Nek pulled in over ₹1 billion ($11 million) last year.
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The company also made a big strategic shift: moving from being a middleman for a third-party digital gold provider to building its own end-to-end gold infrastructure. Today, Jar buys, stores, and manages gold directly, with Brinks as its custody partner and BDO as its statutory auditor. That means it not only controls more of the value chain but can also distribute gold through partners like PhonePe, Walmart’s fintech arm in India.
Jar is expanding beyond gold, too. Earlier this year, it partnered with BharatPe and Unity Small Finance Bank to enable digital payments through UPI, India’s instant bank-to-bank transfer system. By plugging into the country’s dominant payments network, Jar hopes to boost engagement and keep users inside its ecosystem.
Another feature that’s quietly powering growth? UPI AutoPay. Introduced in 2020, AutoPay allows recurring payments. Jar has leaned on it to fuel its daily-savings model, which CEO and co-founder Nishchay AG calls the app’s “hero feature.”
Jar’s user base cuts across professions: IT engineers, shop owners, daily-wage workers like electricians and plumbers, all saving in their own languages (the app supports nine). Gamification and behavioral nudges keep people coming back. “The growth team consistently built different cohorts based on location, language, phone type, and saving habits,” Nishchay told TechCrunch. “It’s about meeting users where they are.”
The startup has raised $63.3 million to date from Tiger Global, Tribe Capital, Arkam Ventures, and WEH Ventures, and was last valued at over $300 million. But it may soon test how public markets value a fintech that isn’t trying to reinvent savings, digitize it.Can Jar’s “gold-first” approach scale into a full-fledged fintech ecosystem, or will public market investors demand something flashier than steady savings?
