Easebuzz Crosses ₹700 Crore In Revenue But Profit Slides 42% As Real-Money Gaming Ban Bites

Easebuzz, the Pune-based full-stack payments and financial infrastructure platform, closed FY26 with revenue crossing the ₹700 crore mark for the first time, even as a sharp profit decline exposed just how exposed the company's growth has been to a single regulatory shock: the government's ban on real-money gaming apps, imposed at the start of the fiscal year. According to financial statements filed with the Registrar of Companies, Easebuzz's revenue from operations grew 9.1% to ₹716 crore in FY26, up from ₹656 crore in FY25 — a marked slowdown from the 127% revenue growth the company had posted just one year earlier, when its topline more than doubled from ₹289 crore in FY24.

Profitability took a considerably harder hit than revenue growth alone would suggest. Net profit fell 42.1% to ₹11 crore in FY26, down from ₹19 crore in FY25 — itself a year in which profit had surged more than 46-fold from a mere ₹40 lakh in FY24. The whiplash across three consecutive fiscal years, from near-breakeven to explosive profit growth to a sharp reversal, illustrates how sensitive Easebuzz's business model remains to shifts in transaction volume from specific high-frequency merchant categories, even as the company has worked to diversify into steadier, sector-specific revenue streams.

The mechanics of the slowdown are straightforward. Easebuzz operates as a B2B payment gateway for small and medium enterprises, generating the overwhelming majority of its revenue — 97.35% in FY26 — from transaction fees on payments processed through its plug-and-play APIs, with the remainder split between information technology and support fees (₹14 crore) and SaaS fees (₹5 crore). Real-money gaming platforms had historically represented a significant, high-transaction-volume merchant category for payment gateways across the industry; the government's ban on such apps at the start of FY26 removed a meaningful chunk of processing volume industry-wide, and Easebuzz's single-digit revenue growth for the year — a sharp deceleration from its historical trajectory — reflects that disruption directly.

Total income for the year, including ₹7 crore in other income, reached ₹723 crore, up from ₹659 crore in FY25. But total expenses grew faster than revenue, rising 11.7% to ₹708 crore from ₹634 crore — a gap that, on a business already operating on relatively thin transaction-fee margins, was enough to more than halve the company's profit growth trajectory. EBITDA fell to ₹14 crore from ₹28 crore, with EBITDA margin dropping to 1.96% from 4.27%, while return on capital employed collapsed to 3.52% in FY26 from 18.25% in FY25 — a particularly steep decline that reflects both the profit contraction and a larger capital base following the company's prior fundraising. At the unit level, Easebuzz spent ₹0.99 to earn every rupee of operating revenue in FY26, up marginally from ₹0.97 the year before, underscoring the industry-wide reality that payment gateway margins in India remain notoriously thin even for well-capitalised, profitable players.

Balance sheet metrics moved in the same direction. As of March 2026, Easebuzz's total current assets declined 28.4% to ₹141 crore from ₹197 crore in FY25, while cash and bank balances fell 26.1% to ₹105 crore from ₹142 crore — a meaningful drawdown that the company has not publicly detailed the cause of, though it follows a period of continued investment in expanding its regulatory footprint and product suite. Notably, the company reported a sizable rise in other non-current assets during the year, which some financial trackers have linked to proceeds and structuring related to a prior Series A funding round, suggesting at least part of the balance sheet shift reflects deliberate capital allocation rather than operational distress.

Set against the FY26 slowdown, Easebuzz used the year to secure regulatory milestones that position it for a different kind of growth going forward. The company obtained all three key Reserve Bank of India Payment Aggregator authorisations — covering online payments (PA-O), physical payments (PA-P), and cross-border payments (PA-CB) — placing it among a relatively small group of Indian fintech firms licensed across all three categories simultaneously. It also launched Banking Connect IBMB, an interoperable net and mobile banking platform developed jointly with NPCI Bharat BillPay Limited, extending its infrastructure beyond payment acceptance into core banking connectivity. Annual Gross Transaction Value across the platform reached nearly $50 billion during the year, and the company said it now serves more than 3 lakh businesses processing over 3 million transactions daily.

Founded in 2014 by Rohit Prasad and Amit Kumar and backed by investors including Beesemer, Easebuzz has increasingly positioned itself as a financial-operations platform rather than a generic payment gateway, building sector-specific SaaS products with embedded payments for education, government, healthcare, real estate, financial services, housing societies, travel and religious institutions. Commenting on the year's results, Prasad framed FY26 as 'a defining year for Easebuzz as we strengthened our position as a full-stack payments and financial infrastructure platform through sustained profitable growth, key regulatory milestones and continued product innovation,' adding that the company intends to keep investing in technology and compliance 'to support the next phase of India's digital economy.' That framing — emphasising regulatory and infrastructure milestones over the raw revenue growth figures — reads as a deliberate attempt to shift investor and market attention away from a slowdown driven by a policy shock outside the company's control, and toward a broader platform strategy the company argues will prove more durable over subsequent fiscal years.

The gaming ban's impact on Easebuzz also offers a useful data point for India's wider payments industry, where competitors including Razorpay, Pine Labs and PayU have similarly built meaningful transaction volume from gaming and entertainment merchant categories over the past several years. Easebuzz's FY26 numbers suggest that even well-diversified, profitable payment infrastructure companies remain more exposed to sudden regulatory shifts in specific merchant categories than their broader platform narratives might suggest — a risk factor likely to feature prominently in how investors and potential acquirers assess valuations across the sector heading into FY27.

For Easebuzz, the path back to its earlier growth trajectory will likely depend less on any single new product launch than on how successfully its verticalised SaaS strategy — spanning education, healthcare, real estate and religious institutions — can offset the structural loss of gaming-related transaction volume. The company's three RBI Payment Aggregator licences and its new banking connectivity platform give it a broader regulatory and product foundation than it had heading into FY26; whether that foundation translates into a return to double-digit or higher profit growth will be the key question for FY27.