Sumit
Khandelwal

The office was not an office. It was a sliver of a room - borrowed, not rented - handed over in exchange for equity in a company that did not yet exist in any meaningful sense. Sumit Khandelwal walked in with a co-founder, a hypothesis about India's gifting industry, and very little else. That was March 2012. Today, the company they started there processes 250,000 transactions every single day, serves 5,000 enterprise clients on six continents, and has crossed a billion dollars in cumulative gross merchandise value.

Xoxoday did not start as a rewards platform. It started as GiftXoxo - a consumer gifting marketplace built on the belief that India's ancient gifting culture was being catastrophically underserved by technology. The country was spending billions on gifts and getting, largely, a broken, fragmented experience in return. Sumit and co-founder Manoj Agarwal saw the gap and decided to fill it. The name itself came out of a family dinner conversation, the kind of origin story that sounds invented but isn't.

The first online order landed on July 20, 2012 - co-founder Manoj Agarwal's birthday, which gives the story a convenient symmetry that real life rarely provides. The first big pivot came from John Kuruvila, a former Air Deccan executive who told them something obvious in retrospect: revenue momentum matters. Stop chasing the elegant long game and fuel the business that's actually generating revenue. That pivot - from social group gifting toward bulk corporate orders - was the hinge everything else swung on. By Diwali 2012, GiftXoxo was hitting 20 lakh rupees a month.

From Soaps to SaaS

Before Xoxoday, Sumit Khandelwal ran a career that looks, in hindsight, like deliberate preparation - though he almost certainly did not see it that way at the time. Electronics engineering at Nagpur University led to a software engineering role at Hexaware Technologies. Then came a PGDM at T.A. Pai Management Institute in Manipal - the school he would return to in 2025 as the CEO alumnus invited to give a CXO talk to students. At Wipro Consumer Care, he managed the Santoor soap brand: pricing decisions, SKU mix, coordinating between sales, production, and marketing. The discipline of FMCG - where margins are thin and consumer psychology is everything - was an unlikely primer for building a B2B SaaS platform. But the pattern holds.

Metro Cash and Carry came next, where he oversaw private label brands before deciding, in 2012, that working for someone else's ambition had run its course. He quit. He co-founded. The rest is a decade of decisions that look obviously right only because they worked.

The Architecture of Motivation

What Xoxoday eventually built is not simply a rewards catalog - though the catalog spans 100+ countries and covers everything from gift cards to experiences to digital payouts. The more accurate description is a full-stack motivation infrastructure. The platform operates across four distinct domains: customer loyalty programs, sales and channel incentives, employee recognition, and benefits management. Each has its own product line. Plum handles global rewards and payouts across 175+ countries. Empuls manages employee engagement and recognition. Loyalife powers customer loyalty and referral programs. Compass is aimed at sales incentive management.

By 2022, with the Series B round led by Giift and Apis Partners bringing in $30 million, Xoxoday had become something that required serious institutional backing to match its ambitions. The thesis - that human motivation is a technology problem worth solving at enterprise scale - had proven itself out across thousands of clients. Salesforce, Shopify, HubSpot, and Stripe sit among its technology integrations; 540 employees work across 9 offices from North America to EMEA.

Series C and the Road to Public Markets

January 2026: Xoxoday closes its Series C, again backed by existing investors Apis Partners and 57 Stars. The numbers at that point - profitable operations, $1 billion in cumulative GMV, 60 million users engaged globally, 250,000 daily transactions - make the funding less about survival and more about acceleration. Sumit Khandelwal is direct about what comes next: targeted acquisitions, expanded distribution and fulfillment partnerships, and a potential IPO by late 2027 or early 2028, contingent on market conditions.

That word - "institution" - is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Sumit is not talking about a successful exit or a good outcome for investors. He is talking about a category-defining company that outlasts the current funding cycle. The difference between those two ambitions is significant, and the choice of word is deliberate.

Back to TAPMI - The Talk He Gave That Said Everything

In 2025, Sumit returned to T.A. Pai Management Institute as part of the CXO Talk Series - the alumnus who made it, invited back to tell students how. What he chose to talk about was not the milestone numbers. It was the early failures, the corporate struggles, the moments before Xoxoday existed where things did not go as planned. Prof. Rajeev Kumra, assessing the session afterward, called Khandelwal's journey an example of "resilience and innovation." The students who filled the room heard a different kind of business school case study: one where the protagonist had to be rebuilt before the company could be built.

Sumit Khandelwal is based in Redwood City, California, steering a company headquartered across Bengaluru and the San Francisco Bay Area with the operational complexity that implies. Electronics engineer, FMCG brand manager, startup founder, global CEO. The through-line is not a straight one, but it is a coherent one: someone who learned how systems work before he learned how to build them differently.

Key Achievements

• Built Xoxoday from a single shared office room to a profitable global SaaS platform
• Scaled to 60 million+ users in 175+ countries with 9 global offices
• Crossed $1 billion in cumulative gross merchandise value
• Closed Series C from Apis Partners and 57 Stars in January 2026
• Led acquisition of five companies between 2015-2016 to accelerate platform capabilities
• Grew platform to process 250,000 transactions daily across 100+ countries
• Built product suite spanning Plum, Empuls, Loyalife, and Compass
• Achieved profitability ahead of planned IPO trajectory in 2027-2028
• Named to TAPMI CXO Talk Series 2025 as returning alumnus-CEO