A used truck has already had one life. Someone has driven it, maintained it, perhaps worked it hard. For its next owner, though, it can represent a beginning: a transport business, another route, a chance to earn with an asset that costs less than a new one. Arun Kogta has built his financial-services career around the practical world in which such purchases happen. It is a world of vehicles, repayment schedules and small enterprises, now connected to investors a considerable distance from the nearest truck yard.
Kogta is managing director and chief executive officer of Kogta Financial, the Jaipur-based lender established by an earlier generation of his family. His own chapter began in 2004. The company’s first institutional investment followed in 2016. By June 2024, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan had announced a ₹1,230 crore investment transaction. A business lending against assets in India had become a destination for capital managed on behalf of Canadian teachers.
The connection sounds improbable until you look at the work between the two ends. A lender must understand the customer well enough to make a loan, and organise itself well enough to convince someone else to finance that lending. Kogta’s career runs through both demands.
An engineer enters the family business
His preparation took a route through concrete before it reached credit. Kogta studied civil engineering at Pune University, at D. Y. Patil College of Engineering. He worked as a project engineer at Giriraj Construction. His education also includes an MBA in finance from Cardiff University in the United Kingdom.
Those qualifications sit neatly beside one another on a biography. They do not, by themselves, explain a career choice. What they establish is a background that crosses construction and finance, followed by an operating career in lending. His public professional profile lists Pune as his base; the company he leads is headquartered in Jaipur.
Kogta Financial was incorporated in 1996 by Banwari Lal Kogta, Bal Mukund Kogta and Radha Krishan Kogta. Its commercial-vehicle finance operations began in 1998. When Arun arrived, he was joining an enterprise with a history already underway. The distinction gives his story its shape: the work of expanding an existing business, carrying a familiar name into unfamiliar territory.
Succession can sound pleasantly automatic when condensed into a sentence. In practice, a business still needs customers, staff and decisions. A surname is wonderfully economical on stationery. It offers rather less assistance with a repayment schedule.
The borrower has somewhere to go
The company’s customers have included small road transporters, taxi operators, farmers, retail traders and small-scale entrepreneurs. Its products cover commercial vehicles, cars and tractors, alongside construction equipment and secured business lending. Loans against property widen the range of assets around which a borrowing decision can be made.
These are tangible purchases. A tractor or a commercial vehicle has a job to perform. The lending question concerns the price of the asset, its usefulness to the borrower and the money available to repay the debt. The vehicle may be easy to photograph. The judgment behind the loan is harder to display.
Arun’s responsibilities connect the inviting side of lending with the demanding side. Marketing, credit, risk analysis and collections all appear in his operating brief. So do business-development strategy, new disbursement locations and the assessment of new product segments. The sale and the repayment belong to the same job.
His role in geographical expansion has a specific early marker: the company’s 2017–18 annual report credited him with helping extend its presence across Gujarat. Expansion here means choosing where the lending business can operate, then making those locations work. A map pin is a very small symbol for a fairly large responsibility.
The first outside seat at the table
In October 2016, Kogta Financial announced its first private-equity investment, from IIFL Seed Ventures Fund I. At that point it operated in Rajasthan, Gujarat and Maharashtra. Arun, then identified as managing director, welcomed the investor’s experience as an aid to the company’s growth plans.
That emphasis on experience matters. More capital allows a lender to contemplate more business. Outside investors also bring their own expectations of reporting, processes and management. The opportunity becomes a question of how the enterprise will perform at a different size.
The business can be understood as a chain of decisions. A customer is assessed. A loan is approved and disbursed. Instalments are collected. The lender’s own funding obligations continue throughout. Growth asks that chain to handle more cases while preserving the quality of its judgments. Every additional branch adds reach, and another place where the organisation must work.
By 2018, a ₹154 crore investment round led by Morgan Stanley Private Equity Asia, with existing investor IIFL, had added another institutional relationship. Kogta’s public response expressed appreciation for the new partner and for IIFL’s earlier confidence. Successive rounds would make that investor table wider still.
Brothers, colleagues, and a wider boardroom
Arun’s brother Varun is the company’s chief financial officer. Their relationship is disclosed in the company’s governance documents. Their jobs have different emphases: Arun handles business strategy, operations and geographical expansion; Varun’s responsibilities include finance, information technology and human resources. Nayan Kogta, the chief operating officer, handles operations and credit.
A family enterprise can preserve continuity while adding people whose experience was acquired elsewhere. That is part of this company’s development. Its leadership includes professionals, and its board includes independent directors and representatives of institutional investors. During FY2024–25, experienced banker Romesh Sobti joined as chairman and a non-executive independent director.
The result places the family’s operating knowledge in a larger organisational setting. Decisions have colleagues to implement them and a board to examine them. Arun’s expanding brief therefore includes a relationship with the institution itself: the business has to remain intelligible to people who did not grow up inside it.
The long route to a Canadian pension fund
In 2019, a ₹300 crore Series C round led by Creador, with Morgan Stanley participating, marked another step. Arun spoke about strengthening systems and processes, extending the company’s presence and protecting credit quality. At the time, the business reported 105 branches across eight states. Those ambitions concern the machinery of lending as much as its geographical reach.
March 2022 brought a ₹846 crore Series D round led by Multiples, with CPP Investments joining and existing investors participating. IIFL’s fund gained a secondary exit. Kogta Financial then reported more than ₹2,000 crore in assets under management and over 175 branches. Arun set out an ambition to reach ₹5,000 crore in AUM within two years.
In June 2024, Ontario Teachers’ arrived. The announced ₹1,230 crore transaction included capital for growth and partial exits for Morgan Stanley and Creador. It was consequently more complex than a single cheque going into the lending book. Existing owners could sell part of their holdings while a new investor acquired a significant minority stake.
For Arun, the new partner offered experience for the next phase of expansion. The company then reported roughly ₹4,800 crore in AUM and more than 225 branches. The investor relationship had travelled a long way since the first institutional round; the underlying work still involved financing vehicles and small businesses.
The arithmetic after the applause
A funding announcement has a date. A loan book has a much longer memory. Growth creates more opportunities to lend, but the results of those decisions emerge over time. A company can expand its reach while finding that some customers are having greater difficulty paying.
At March 2025, gross non-performing assets stood at 3.27%, compared with 2.63% a year earlier. Net non-performing assets were 1.77%, against 1.30%. These figures make credit quality part of the growth story. They also explain why collections and risk analysis belong so prominently in Arun’s responsibilities.
Secured lending gives the lender an asset behind the loan. The customer still needs cash to make the instalments. For a business serving transport and agriculture, the condition of the borrower’s working economy therefore matters alongside the collateral. A handsome balance sheet cannot arrange a paying customer for a truck owner.
The FY2025–26 annual report brought another increase in scale: ₹8,299.58 crore in AUM and 276 branches at March 2026. Gross NPA was 3.83%; net NPA was 2.07%. The larger book came with further pressure on asset quality. For the executive responsible for operations, both sides of that sentence count.
“how we lend matters as much as how much we lend.”
Arun Kogta, FY2025–26 letter to stakeholders
What comes after a larger loan book?
After the 2024 investment, Arun discussed a potential public listing on an 18-to-24-month timetable, with the possibility of moving faster if markets were favourable. The statement belongs to June 2024: a conditional ambition expressed after a funding round. It shows how he was thinking about the next stage.
His FY2025–26 letter concentrates on disciplined underwriting, prudent risk management and stronger technology and data systems. He describes digital capabilities as supporting the company’s branch network and customer relationships. The priorities bring the story back to execution: deciding whom to lend to, understanding the risks and maintaining the organisation that serves them.
The engineer’s biography and the lender’s expansion make an interesting pairing. One concerns the preparation of a person. The other concerns the construction of an institution. Arun Kogta’s documented work joins them through operating decisions, new locations and successive investor partnerships.
For all the distance travelled by its capital, the company’s business remains close to things that move, carry and work. A used vehicle has another journey ahead of it. Financing that journey is where Kogta’s next set of decisions begins.