Ruchi Kalra And Ashish Mohapatra Founders Of A Startup Each, Become India’s First Unicorn Couple. #CoupleGoals, Anyone?

By Ritu Sanghvi Updated March 24, 2022 12:05 PM

They say marriage helps couples grow individually as well and this couple just proved that right. Which couple am I talking about? Well, it is none other than India’s first unicorn couple – Ruchi Kalra and Ashish Mohapatra. Yep, the couple became the first-ever husband and wife to build their respective startups into companies that have at least a $1 billion valuation, also known as unicorns.

Ruchi Kalra and Ashish Mohapatra met when they were working at Mckinsey & Co. and surprisingly both of them are also alums of the Indian Institute of Technology. Both of their respective startups – Oxyzo Financial Services (by Kalra) and OfBusiness (by Mohapatra) – are extremely profitable.

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The 38-year-old Ruchi Kalra founded Oxyzo Financial Services, a digital lending service, that created history with its $200 million fundraisings that were led by Alpha Wave Global, Tiger Global Management, Norwest Venture Partners, and others. And the best news is that, just a year later, her husband, Ashish Mohapatra, who founded OfBusiness, reached the same valuation after it was backed by SoftBank Group Corp. and others.

Ruchi Kalra is a chief executive of Oxyzo Financial Services – a startup in which Matrix Partners and Creation Investments also invested. Kalra’s startup was founded in 2017 by her, her husband, and 3 others as an offshoot of Ashish’s first startup, OfBusiness.

As per reports, the 41-year-old Ashish Mohapatra is the CEO of OfBusiness which was founded back in 2016 by him, Ruchi Kalra, and 3 others. It was back in 2021 that the valuation of the startup surpassed $1 billion after SoftBank and others invested in it in April 2021. And then in December 2021, the valuation of the company surpassed $5 billion as their investors put more money into it.

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Speaking about leaving behind her position as a partner in McKinsey & Co. to join forces with her husband, Ruchi Kalra said, “We both had an itch to go out and build something.” Both the companies – Oxyzo Financial Services and OfBusiness – have two separate offices and teams. However, both of them target the same industries and are both based in Gurgaon.

A statement from one of the investors – Norwest – of Oxyzo Financial Services described Ruchi Kalra as India’s “first female founder in India of a profitable, fintech unicorn.”