DRIP BY DRIP | How Pushkar Mukewar Built Drip Capital After 160 Investor Meetings & a Moment of 'Reckoning’

Some employees cried. Some became angry. A few understood.

Pushkar Mukewar listened to every reaction, one video call at a time. Covid had frozen global trade, Drip Capital’s transaction volumes had fallen sharply and the company’s costs had not disappeared with its business. A significant portion of the team had to go.

Mukewar could have delegated the layoffs. Instead, he decided to speak personally to every affected employee. “It was very traumatic,” he recalls. “I had never done anything like that in my life. I did not know how to react to people.”

Sleep became difficult. Guilt arrived easily. Mukewar had hired these people. He had persuaded them to believe in Drip Capital, a young trade-finance company attempting to fund small exporters whom traditional banks frequently found too small, complicated or risky. Now he was telling them that the company could no longer keep them.

The discomfort went deeper.

Mukewar had always taken pride in being liked. Covid taught him that a chief executive could not build his identity around being popular. There would be days when he had to motivate people, distribute responsibility and make them believe that the impossible could be attempted. There would also be days when survival demanded decisions that would make some of those same people dislike him. “That was the first time I had to do what I had to do,” he recounts.

Drip Capital operates in the awkward gap between shipment and payment. A small exporter may dispatch goods today but wait 60, 90 or even 120 days for an overseas buyer to pay. Salaries, raw materials and the next order cannot wait. Drip examines the transaction, invoice and buyer risk, advances money against the receivable and collects the payment when it falls due. In the US, it also finances supplier payments for buyers seeking longer credit periods. Put simply, Drip releases money trapped inside global trade.

It was a brutal business education for a man who had spent years collecting some of the finest education available. Mukewar studied at Georgia Tech, worked at Capital One, became a consultant at Oliver Wyman, earned an MBA from Wharton and crossed over to venture capital. He had learnt how to analyse businesses, advise executives, build spreadsheets and assess entrepreneurs. Then he became an entrepreneur and discovered that preparation could become a hiding place.

The Doctor Who Escaped the Hospital

Mukewar grew up in Nagpur in a family full of doctors. His father was a doctor. His brother became one. So did cousins, uncles and aunts. His father had built a practice and expanded it into a hospital. As the eldest son, Mukewar appeared to have inherited a career before he had chosen one.

He took both the medical and engineering entrance examinations and qualified in both. One day before medical counselling, he changed the family script. Mukewar chose engineering. Medicine had begun to look frighteningly predictable. He could see the entire film before it started: medical college, his father’s hospital, a settled life in Nagpur. Engineering offered uncertainty, which appeared far more exciting from a distance.

The decision also removed the safety net beneath him.

Had he become a doctor, he would have inherited his father’s reputation, practice and institutional base. Once he chose engineering, Mukewar knew that he would have to build his own identity. “I had to prove myself,” he says. He moved to Pune to study engineering and later went to Georgia Tech for a master’s programme in computer science and computational biology. His father helped, but Mukewar also took a student loan. A year into the programme, the American employment market looked bleak and the adventure began to resemble a financial miscalculation.

Then a few finance courses altered his direction again. Mukewar added a minor in finance and found a job at Capital One, which had built its reputation by using data and analytics to lend to customer segments that other banks avoided. The experience would later become relevant to DripCapital: use information, technology and risk assessment to serve businesses sitting beyond the comfort zone of conventional lenders. Capital One led to Oliver Wyman. Mukewar had applied to several consulting firms, but Oliver Wyman was the only one that interviewed him.

He cracked the opening. In his mid-twenties, he gave up his apartment and began living in hotels and out of a suitcase. Consulting assignments took him across the US, Europe and the Middle East. He worked with senior executives, travelled extensively and shared conference rooms with colleagues carrying Ivy League pedigrees. He later applied to only three business schools: Harvard, Stanford and Wharton. Only Wharton called. Mukewar got in. Another rejection funnel had produced one door.

The VC Who Hated Watching

After years in the US, Mukewar wanted to return to India. America had offered education, work and movement, but it never quite became home. India, meanwhile, was being spoken about as the next great economic story. In 2011, he joined Sama Capital in Bengaluru.

It looked like a sensible landing. Venture capital would allow him to study India’s emerging startup ecosystem while moving closer to an ambition inherited, ironically, from his doctor father. His father had built a hospital.

Mukewar, too, wanted to build something. Venture capital showed him founders from close quarters. It also showed him the limitations of watching. “I just hated it,” he says with unusual bluntness. As an associate or principal, Mukewar could meet entrepreneurs, evaluate companies and support an investment argument. The final decision belonged to the partners. He found himself sitting beside the game when he wanted the ball. “I am not an investor type,” he says. “I like to get my hands dirty.”

By 2014-15, remaining safely employed had started to feel riskier than leaving. Mukewar reconnected with Neil Kothari, a Wharton friend who had worked with Goldman Sachs, BlackRock and Cisco. They spoke for months about building something together.

Mukewar requested a sabbatical. His firm left the door open in case he returned. His wife remained in Bengaluru. Mukewar moved to California and stayed with Kothari. The two men had experience in engineering, technology and financial services. Fintech appeared to be the logical answer.

Logic, however, did not produce a company.

For nearly a year and a half, they explored ideas, conducted research, spoke to experts and built spreadsheets. Whenever they discovered an existing competitor or heard a sufficiently discouraging opinion, they moved to another possibility.

Mukewar calls it “analysis paralysis”. The skills that had helped him succeed at Capital One, Oliver Wyman, Wharton and Sama Capital had become a trap. Entrepreneurs did not receive marks for identifying every possible reason an idea might fail. They had to build something and persuade somebody to buy it. The founders had quit their jobs, but they had not fully started.

A Company With ‘No Future’

Mukewar and Kothari eventually registered Drip Capital and put roughly $40,000-50,000 of their savings into the venture.

They began in the US, attending trade shows and speaking to small businesses. A recurring problem surfaced. An American supplier might receive a substantial purchase order from a large retailer such as Walmart but lack the working capital to fulfil it. Electronic Data Interchange made some of these orders digitally verifiable, providing Drip with a potential foundation for underwriting.

The founders began making small loans. Customer interest appeared. Their savings, however, could not support a lending business for long. Then came Y Combinator. After almost two years without proper salaries or certainty, admission into YC became Drip Capital’s first significant external validation. The founders raised roughly half a million dollars around the programme.

It still was not enough. Mukewar says they met nearly 160 investors while trying to raise more capital. Drip remained among the more lightly funded startups in its YC batch. Investors saw better-capitalised competitors in the American market and struggled to understand what would make Drip different.

Mukewar’s visa constraints forced him to return to India. Kothari became unavailable for a few months. The startup had been incorporated. It had raised some money. It had found early demand. It also appeared to be heading nowhere. “The company was incorporated, but there was no future, literally,” Mukewar recalls.

The journey back to India produced the future. While speaking with American businesses, the founders had noticed that many needed funding to pay overseas suppliers. Much of the manufacturing was happening outside the US. Perhaps Drip was standing on the wrong side of the transaction.

Mukewar flipped the model. Instead of financing only the American buyers, Drip would provide working capital to small exporters in emerging markets. India offered a vast population of businesses that were commercially viable but frequently underserved by banks. Mukewar travelled to Surat and Tiruppur. He met exporters and attempted to sell them a financial product that Drip had not completely built. With his co-founder away, he handled sales, credit assessment and risk himself.

Cold outreach took him to Dhara Foods in Anand, Gujarat. The food processor supplied American grocery stores and faced a working-capital cycle stretching to around 120 days. Drip could finance its invoices, allowing the exporter to access money before the overseas buyer finally paid. Dhara Foods became the first customer of Drip’s reinvented model. Soon, three or four more exporters in the India-US food and grocery corridor came aboard. The founders deployed virtually all the money they had raised to finance these customers. Demand had been established. Drip was almost out of money again.

Looking for Debt, Finding Equity

Mukewar returned to the US seeking approximately $1 million in debt. Nobody wanted to lend to a three-person company with a small capital base. Years later, he can see the lenders’ point. “I would also probably not lend” to such a company, he says.

The investors refusing to provide debt became interested in providing equity. Wing Venture Capital agreed to lead an investment. Accel followed, expanding the round to approximately $4.5 million. Mukewar had gone looking for $1 million in debt. He returned with more than four times that amount in equity.

Drip finally had the capital to hire its first engineer, risk specialist and product professional. Mukewar established a base in Mumbai. From 2017, the company began expanding beyond the India-US corridor and raised larger rounds. The cap table gradually acquired names that could compensate for the absence of a public revenue ticker. Drip’s equity backers have included Accel, Sequoia India, now Peak XV Partners, Wing VC, Y Combinator, TI Platform, GMO Payment Gateway and Japan’s Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation. Its institutional funding relationships have included Barclays, East West Bank, Toronto-Dominion Bank and the International Finance Corporation, part of the World Bank Group.

In 2021, Drip announced a $175 million capital raise comprising a $40 million Series C round and $135 million in warehouse debt facilities. In 2024, it secured another $113 million, including $23 million in equity from GMO Payment Gateway and SMBC and $90 million in debt led by IFC and East West Bank. IFC’s disclosures identify Accel, Wing, TI Platform and Sequoia Capital India among the company’s major shareholders. Drip Capital, IFC

In April 2026, Drip claimed that it had facilitated more than $9 billion in cross-border trade for over 11,000 businesses across more than 100 countries. Around $2 billion of those transactions came in FY2025-26. Drip Capital

Those numbers came much later. First came Covid.

The Cost of Survival

Drip sat between exporters seeking money and investors supplying the capital used to finance their invoices. When global trade slowed during the pandemic, businesses stopped exporting, transaction volumes collapsed and some capital providers became cautious. Drip returned capital to protect its balance sheet. Revenue fell while teams and offices continued to cost money.

Then came the calls.

Mukewar says the experience changed his understanding of leadership. A founder who accepts responsibility for hiring must also accept responsibility when jobs disappear. He could not make the decision painless, but he could deliver it himself.

The company survived, and trade eventually returned. Yet Covid exposed another fracture.

Mukewar wanted to deepen Drip’s presence in India. Kothari wanted to build Mexico. Drip entered Mexico so that Kothari could take a more active operating role. But running across India, the US and Mexico introduced time- zone, language and cultural complications. In 2020, Kothari left the company and Mukewar took charge.

The separation was emotionally difficult. The Mexico business nevertheless grew. Drip raised its Series C round in 2021 and entered another period of expansion.

Then interest rates rose sharply. Dollar funding became more expensive, weakening its advantage for Mexican small businesses. Venture capital also became scarcer. Drip withdrew from Mexico, reduced its broader footprint, revisited pricing and concentrated on India and the US.

Mukewar imposed a deadline: Drip had eight or nine months to become profitable. The company says it reached cash profitability by the end of 2023. It retained trade finance as its core and began building a B2B commerce platform connecting businesses with buyers and suppliers. Lending had taught Mukewar the value of depth. The company no longer needed to plant flags in every promising geography merely to demonstrate ambition. “Let us not get exotic,” he says. “There is enough opportunity for us to grow in these markets.”

Five Years Late

Mukewar has now been a consultant, venture capitalist and founder. Given another chance, he would still choose the founder’s chair. Entrepreneurship, he says, allows a person to trust instinct, control a part of one’s destiny and discover how one behaves when the spreadsheet stops offering answers. It has been the most difficult and enriching role of his life.

His advice to his younger self initially arrives as a collection of business-school answers: select the right market, understand the opportunity, choose carefully. Pressed to pick only one, he strips away the frameworks: Start earlier. Mukewar spent years acquiring experience before starting Drip Capital. Much of it helped. Capital One taught him data-led lending. Consulting gave him exposure to global financial institutions. Wharton widened his network. Venture capital allowed him to observe founders and funding from close range.

Yet experience eventually began producing diminishing returns. The lessons that mattered most arrived only after he began: how to sell a product that did not exist, survive 160 investor meetings, discover a business model by approaching the transaction from the other side, fire people he had hired, lose a co-founder, abandon a geography and choose profitability when growth had stopped impressing the market. “If it were up to me, I should have started five years earlier than I did,” he says.

At 18, Mukewar rejected a predictable life because he wanted adventure. Years later, after leaving medicine, engineering, consulting and venture capital behind, he finally found it. It looked nothing like the adventure he had imagined. It looked like Drip.