Second Thoughts: Playing the Long Game with Himanshu Chandra of Progcap

Some stories begin with the pitch, the deck, the believers who saw something in a napkin sketch. But this isn’t that story.

Second Thoughts is a show about what happens next, when early believers want liquidity, when conviction starts to cost more than capital, when secondaries enter the room, and when founders, quietly and persistently, choose to play the long game.

In this episode, we speak with Himanshu Chandra, co-founder of Progcap, a fintech that’s moved ₹40,000 crore in specialised working capital financing, without high burn, without chasing headlines. Instead, they’ve built an operating leverage machine rooted in real economic productivity: financing tier 2, 3, and 4 retailers who traditional lenders ignore.

Now backed by Tiger, Sequoia, Google, and Creation, Progcap is profitable, holds its own NBFC license, and is within striking distance of a public listing. But what makes this story remarkable isn’t the milestone count. It’s the founder’s emotional fluency and discipline around risk, transition, and time.

From Platform to NBFC

Between 2018 and 2022, Progcap operated as a capital-light marketplace, managing customer experience while larger lenders took on balance sheet risk. Then came the RBI’s digital lending guidelines, which drew stricter lines around who owns risk and how it’s underwritten.

This wasn’t a theoretical shift for Progcap. Their daily transaction-based credit model couldn’t afford even a few days of pause. So, in the middle of Diwali season 2022, they hit pause anyway, on disbursals, on growth, on business as usual and moved entirely to their own NBFC structure.

For a company already working well, the transition could have been optional. But for Himanshu, customer continuity trumped structural inertia. It was a bet on trust over timeline.

“Customer experience was at the centre. We knew our users needed liquidity every day.”

Discipline Over Theatre

Today, Progcap works with 140 corporates (ranging from ₹5,000 to ₹1,00,000 crore in turnover), sees transactional data from 800,000 retailers daily, and selectively serves 28,000 of them.

The standout isn’t just scale, but selectivity. Himanshu describes a culture of iterative underwriting. one where losses are lessons, not write-offs, and real-time data is a compass.

What’s their internal north star? A non-MIS metric they call “routing”, tracking what percentage of transactions flow through Progcap’s systems. If it drops, they don’t blame attrition—they investigate. Price? Timing? Terms? It’s a signal worth listening to.

Early Liquidity, Thoughtfully Done

In a market where secondaries are still nascent, Progcap offered partial exits to its earliest backers, Merak Ventures and GrowX, as early as 2021, just 3–4 years into the journey. It wasn’t a cap table clean-up. It was a carefully timed moment of value creation and redistribution.

“We blended primary and secondary. It gave new investors meaningful ownership, and gave early believers a return—without having to wait a decade.”

That same discipline extended to employee liquidity, which Progcap facilitated across two rounds. For a company built on cashflows and operating rigour, these moments weren’t perks. They were intentional design.

IPO on the Horizon, But No Rush

As Progcap scales its AUM towards the ₹6,000 crore threshold, Himanshu sees the public market as a logical next chapter—not a goal, but a capital tool. Whether through IPO or private capital, the north star remains the same: resilience, profitability, and access-first infrastructure.

The company’s origin story may have been about frictionless credit, but today, it’s also about a new kind of data visibility. With transactional data across brands, SKUs, and geographies, Progcap can now forecast economic activity from the grassroots up.

“We see what’s selling, where stock is sitting, how much credit converts to cash—often before brands do.”

Second Thoughts, In Retrospect

When asked about a decision they’d revisit, Himanshu doesn’t bring up hiring mistakes or missed investor calls. He talks about a product they built too late, real-time credit.

“We had the data. We waited to build the tech. Had we moved earlier, our scale would have come faster.”

And when asked about second thoughts that paid off?

It was this: not outsourcing tech..

“Speed and adaptability come from ownership. We needed that flexibility in-house.”

🎧 Listen to the full episode to hear how Himanshu Chandra built one of India’s most capital-efficient fintechs—without burn, with backbone, and with a clear path to IPO.

Frequently Asked Questions