Dharmendra Maurya

Onboarding for NRIs has always been a pain. Right now, the FCNR deposit scheme is a total no-brainer: the RBI is bearing the currency hedging bill, allowing you to get local, FD-like rates while your money stays in dollars with zero rupee risk. But despite how good the scheme is, it doesn't help if opening an account takes 60 days. By the time the paperwork clears, the window might have closed, or the NRI may have lost interest. @rupeeflo, a @Rainmatterin-backed startup, is trying to solve this problem. They've partnered with leading banks to slash that 60-day onboarding down to just 24 hours, covering the bank account, trading account, demat, and the whole works. It will be interesting to watch what happens to activation rates once friction is this low. Does removing the 60-day wait actually change NRI behavior, or does the inertia live somewhere else entirely?

Unacademy turns 10 today I thought it's a good occasion to jot down some thoughts on this day about the wild ride that we have gone through. Ten years ago, we started with a simple mission: to empower great educators and make their content accessible to everyone. This is when the company was started. Unacademy started as a YouTube channel in 2010, 15 years ago. When I was in the 3rd year of my college. And I started making videos on computer science to help my friends. It continued as a side project with @RomanSaini joining in 2014, and us blitzscaling the YouTube channel. His UPSC videos would get millions of views that helped us in becoming the number one education channel in the country. We thought that the biggest problem then was that the smartest people are not teaching, and we need a platform where we'll get the best educators who'll create videos for learners for free. Kind of like what Twitch had done to gaming, we wanted to do that to education. Create a YouTube-like platform. And on 10th December 2015, Unacademy was launched. For the first four years, we kept adding more and more great educators to the platform, which would lead to millions of learners joining the platform. There was a point in 2018 when we were doing millions of views per month on our own platform, with Unacademy being the number one education app on the Play Store. And it was all organic growth, because we had a rule to not spend money on performance marketing. These were exciting times. Roman would personally go to the houses of potential educators to convince them to start teaching on an Unacademy. That's how some of the best educators joined the platform. From the beginning, we always thought of ourselves as a tech company operating in education. Unlike every other player in the market which behaved like an education company using tech to enable them. That's why we had features like streaks, knowledge hats, and a lot of gamification built in for educators and learners. Educators would get massively addicted to the knowledge hats which the learners would gift them on crossing certain milestones. Even till today, some of the biggest educators that we have are the ones who grew on the free platform that we had built as our first product. Then, in 2019, just one year before Covid hit, we launched a subscription product where learners could buy a subscription and get access to live classes from the best educators for their exam. The product was an instant hit. From zero revenue in January 2019 to $1.8M revenue in September 2019, we were one of the fastest growing companies to get to almost $20M Bookings ARR in nine months. The next one year was crazy because our revenue kept scaling and especially post-Covid, we were growing even faster. Almost 1M Paid Subscribers were now enrolled on Unacademy. There were three back-to-back funding rounds. From being a $100M valuation at the start of 2019, we were at a $1.5B valuation by September 2020. We had spent less than $50M to reach a valuation of $1.5B. But soon the distractions began. In the next few months, we did another round, ended up raising another $440 million. Totalling the fund raise to more than $700 million in just less than two years. We thought that what we are seeing in COVID would sustain forever and that's the new reality. And started burning a lot of money to acquire a lot of market share, without realizing that education business is slightly different from a normal tech business, and here your first transaction is basically your LTV. We had become the number one test prep brand in terms of recall. We were the number one test prep player in terms of online business, which had scaled to almost $100M in revenue.

A newly wed techie couple forced to attend their own reception online after their Indigo flights from Bhubaneswar-Hubbali were cancelled. The bride’s parents having already invited relatives decided to broadcast their live feed on a big screen. #IndigoDelay #FlightCancellations

My Delhi weather app screen, directly from Nano Banana 🍌

Out now @elonmusk

Smart solutions building stronger fintech industry! Catch Startup Demo 4 featuring: @rupeeflo, @ProfintechHQ, @hellorealx, RocketPay, @Tutelar_io, SaveIN See how startups are reshaping the industry! @itsdharmendra08 @GosainArpit @senzibl @neera_inamdar01

Rupees ₹1,977 crore! This was the amount pending for collection in the then Central Electricity Supply Utility of Odisha in 2019. I was the new CEO. These arrears were mostly in rural areas. If staff went for disconnection, they were assaulted. Sometimes entire villages united and chased them away. We decided to launch a disconnection drive and issued notices, giving defaulters two months to clear dues. Just before the drive, some local leaders urged villagers not to allow our teams inside. We were very anxious. But aborting the plan would have been a loss of face, both professionally and personally. The outcome surprised everyone. In two months, we collected an unprecedented ₹240 crore. There wasn’t a single incident of assault or police case. How was this possible? Because we structured the drive around a simple, universal human trait: jealousy. People rarely oppose action against those who are better off than them. Often, they quietly welcome it. Phase 1: We announced that defaulting industries would be targeted first. There was a widespread misconception that industries were the big defaulters. In reality, the industrial arrears were negligible. Most industries paid promptly. They couldn’t risk disconnection even for a day. But people loved this announcement. The media kept asking how many industries we had acted against. Phase 2: A week later, we declared that consumers with arrears above ₹50,000 would be targeted. Out of more than 50 lakh consumers, this group was just 10–20 thousand. Most people were below this slab, so they felt safe and supportive. Phase 3: Next, we announced action against households with more than one AC, multi-storey houses, or cars. In rural Odisha, very few households fit that description, and those who did were usually envied. Instead of resistance, there was visible enthusiasm. When our teams reached, there was zero opposition. After all, who doesn’t secretly enjoy watching a wealthy neighbour face heat? Phase 4 and 5: By then, momentum was strong. The next phases targeted arrears above ₹20,000 and finally everyone left from the earlier phases. When we reached the lowest category, the largest in number, there was still no resistance. The campaign had gained momentum. Those targeted in the earlier phases supported us. The narrative had shifted, and the drive rolled smoothly. The huge revenue flow transformed our balance sheet, which showed no loss for the first time in the utility’s history.

🎉 Congratulations DMA @rupeeflo for being a finalist in the Fintech Startup of the Year category at IFTA 2025! Join us to celebrate the brightest minds in fintech. 📅 10 Dec 2025 | 📍 Aurika, Mumbai @itsdharmendra08 #IFTA2025 #Fintech #Innovation

The next chapter of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership: aka.ms/AAyczj7

NRE and NRO account can be now linked to Paytm app !

May joy and warmth accompany you along with prosperity. Let us together celebrate the achievements and great beginnings of Pongal, Lohri, Uttarayan and Makar Sankranti🌾🪁🔥 #Rupeeflo #HappyPongal #HappyLohri #Uttarayan #MakarSankranti

UPI isn’t just revolutionizing payments in India—it’s going global! 🌍 Did you know NRIs can use UPI to make payments in India, even from abroad? 💳✨ Learn how to set it up here: rupeeflo.com/blogs/how-can-n… #UPI #NRIs #DigitalPayments