Pushkar Mukewar learned to stop watching and start lending

A cold call took Pushkar Mukewar to Anand, Gujarat, to meet an exporter selling packaged food to American grocery stores. The business, Dhara Foods, had customers overseas and a problem closer to home: it could not provide the collateral that conventional lenders wanted. Mukewar offered financing against its export invoices. Dhara Foods became the first revenue-generating customer of Drip Capital’s Indian exporter business. A food shipment had supplied something an elegant business plan could not: a reason for somebody to pay.

The visit in 2016 gives his career a useful point of entry. There would be larger numbers, institutional investors and international ambitions. Here, though, was a founder travelling to a prospective customer and making a proposition concrete. The exporter needed cash before the buyer’s payment arrived. There was no need to invent demand for the food; the commercial relationship already existed. Financing had to make the timing workable. Mukewar needed to prove that the gap could support a business. Both had an excellent incentive to dispense with ceremony.

The education before the invoice

Mukewar grew up in Nagpur, where small businesses were part of the community around him. He has linked his interest in entrepreneurship to that upbringing and to the importance his family placed on giving back. Access to credit was a recurring difficulty he observed. Long before it became a category in a funding presentation, it was a practical constraint faced by people running businesses.

His route into finance passed through technology. He earned a master’s degree at Georgia Tech and later an MBA at Wharton. At Capital One, he worked on credit risk analytics for consumer lending. At Oliver Wyman, he advised financial services clients, with work spanning the United States, the United Arab Emirates and Switzerland. Those jobs brought him close to the machinery that decides who gets credit, on what terms, and with which assumptions attached.

At Saama Capital, he moved to the other side of the pitch. His work involved Indian startups including Paytm, Snapdeal and Bluestone. There is something pleasingly inconvenient about his eventual career choice: a person employed to assess entrepreneurs decided to become one. Observing a promising business and being responsible for its next payroll are neighbouring occupations with rather different weather.

He has since described the change with characteristic specificity. Investing allowed him to model an outcome in Excel. Operating required people to be hired, systems to be built, technology to be written and a customer to be won. Each activity introduced its own resistance. The spreadsheet, which accepts almost anything typed politely into a cell, offered limited preparation for that.

“I like to get my hands dirty.”

Pushkar Mukewar, on being an operator

An idea acquires a customer

Mukewar and Neil Kothari met at Wharton. They shared experience in technology and finance, and an appetite to build. They left their jobs in 2014 and explored possibilities in lending. Mukewar’s account of that period includes a lengthy search for the right idea: research, conversations and repeated reconsideration. Their analytical training was useful, but it also made finding objections exceptionally easy.

Y Combinator’s Summer 2015 programme supplied an early vote of confidence. At the time, Drip was offering working capital to small American businesses against orders they needed money to fulfil. One example was a potato chip manufacturer that had won shelf space at Whole Foods. A retail breakthrough created a production bill before it created spendable cash. It was a compact demonstration of the problem the founders wanted to address.

The exporter focus followed as the business developed. Mukewar began contacting Indian exporters and meeting them in person. Anand supplied a clear test: could an invoice, an overseas buyer and a real shipment support a financing decision when the seller lacked conventional collateral? Dhara Foods accepted the offer. The opportunity became visible from the supplier’s end of the transaction.

That progression matters because a founder’s history often gets tidied into a single immaculate insight. Drip’s early versions were more exploratory. Mukewar has talked about experimenting, understanding customers and trying again. The eventual product emerged through contact with businesses whose constraints were considerably more persuasive than a theoretical market size.

The waiting is the business

An exporter can complete its immediate job and still be waiting for its money. Goods have been made, packed and shipped; the buyer’s payment terms continue to run. Meanwhile, the seller may need to purchase materials for another order. Drip’s receivables financing brings forward cash tied to an eligible invoice. Its supply chain financing serves the buyer side, allowing suppliers to be paid while buyers receive additional time.

For Mukewar, the interesting work lies in assessing the underlying trade. Seller, buyer and transaction all matter. Digital records can help a lender examine what is actually moving, who is expected to pay and how the parties have behaved. Technology changes the evidence available and the cost of processing it. Credit still requires judgement; a faster decision remains a decision with consequences. For a small business owner, the practical question is whether financing arrives in time to fulfil the next commitment. An approval after the opportunity has passed does little for the order book. That is why speed belongs in the product itself, alongside the amount available and the price of borrowing.

By February 2020, he was describing a business that had originated $600 million in trade and reached buyers in more than 80 countries. The figure marked distance travelled from the first exporter. It also suggested why the task could absorb a career: every shipment has a payment sequence, and every business has another use for the cash waiting at the far end.

Capital comes in two flavours

In October 2021, Drip announced $175 million in fresh capital. The components deserve their own lines: $40 million in Series C equity and $135 million in warehouse debt facilities. TI Platform led the equity round; the debt included facilities with Barclays and East West Bank. The company reported more than $2 billion in trade financed by then.

Equity and debt do different jobs in a financing business. Equity backs the company being built. Debt supplies much of the money used to finance the assets on its platform. Calling the entire package venture investment would obscure how the operation works. Mukewar’s business has to attract customers who need money and institutions willing to supply it. Persuasion must survive a credit review at both ends.

September 2024 brought another $113 million package: $23 million in equity from GMO Payment Gateway and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, and $90 million in debt led by IFC and East West Bank. Mukewar also reported that Drip had achieved cash profitability. The ambition was acquiring a stricter accounting companion.

Fewer flags, more depth

Geographic expansion had once included Mexico. By 2024, Mukewar was emphasising deeper work in India and the United States. In his account of expanding abroad, he distinguishes the familiarity of the American market from the work required to understand another country’s customers and culture. Existing Indian exporters had already introduced Drip to American buyers. That relationship gave the US entry a practical starting point.

The lesson is more demanding than the usual invitation to think globally. A map makes every market look equally accessible. Customer habits, language, local funding costs and operating knowledge do not oblige. Choosing where to concentrate becomes part of the founder’s work, particularly when the business must understand risk as well as acquire accounts.

His responsibilities also grew beyond founding the product. Drip’s leadership includes separate risk, product and technology, and legal functions. Mukewar has described scaling as a move from early generalists towards specialists who can build individual functions. A founder who initially carries several jobs eventually has to create an organisation capable of carrying them. Otherwise, growth merely produces a longer personal to-do list.

The order after nine billion

In April 2026, Drip reported more than $9 billion in cumulative cross-border trade finance transactions, including about $2 billion during the 2025-26 financial year. It said it had served more than 11,000 businesses across over 100 countries. These are company-reported transaction measures. They describe the flow of financed trade, rather than Mukewar’s personal wealth or Drip’s revenue.

His next ambition reaches beyond advancing money. Drip Commerce connects businesses with buyers and suppliers, extending the relationship into finding trading partners and managing cross-border activity. The direction had been visible in his earlier discussion of a broader trade facilitation platform. A financed customer still needs a reliable supplier, a suitable buyer and a transaction that can be completed.

His public writing in August 2026 adds another concern: trade rules can change while a shipment is already in motion. A tariff or documentation change may alter the economics before the invoice is paid. He argues for more current assessment of individual transactions and more predictable implementation of trade policy. The aim is to prevent one troubled route from depriving an otherwise viable business of financing everywhere.

The company has set a target of more than $11 billion in cumulative transactions by 2027. That is an intention, with the work still ahead of it. Mukewar’s story is most revealing at this distinction between a model and its execution. The next customer will arrive with particular terms, particular counterparties and a particular reason the money is needed now.

For all the institutional names accumulated along the way, the Anand visit remains a useful measure of the enterprise. Someone had sold something real and could not readily finance the wait. Mukewar went to meet him. A career spent evaluating businesses had become a business prepared to act on its evaluation. The invoice was ordinary. Getting paid earlier made a difference.