The founder of CashKaro has lived life upside down, from Ambala's small town girl to London's investment banker

 Before starting her own Indian cashback website, she worked at Goldman Sachs and Pouring Pounds

Swati Bhargava, co-founder of CashKaro, fought many odds and started her venture with her life partner six years ago. “My parents’ zeal to work and meet all our needs has always inspired me,” she says. Bhargava lived with her parents till she was in Class X, and then the educated young girl won a scholarship from the government of Singapore and went to live in the city-state.

The Singapore Airline Scholarship, given to 35 students from across India, includes the academic fee and living expenses for two years. This grant covered 80% of her tuition fee, and she worked part-time to fund her living expenses. Bhargava says, that from living in a small town to studying with students from 171 countries, her world had turned upside and for the better. 

It was the best way to earn the money that you had invested,” she says. While Bhargava was at LSE, she did her summer internship in 2005 at Goldman Sachs in London and was later offered a full-time role as an analyst there. She then took up a position in their credit structuring and sales team three years later, within the investment banking division, which she held for four years.

She later moved to the executive office where she managed client engagements and relationships for the co-CEOs of Goldman Sachs International, Richard Gnodde & Michael Sherwood, as an associate. “For those five years at Goldman Sachs, I was working round the clock. My body had certainly given up and I needed a break,” Bhargava says.

“In many of the paths I took, I was the only woman — at Goldman Sachs, I was the only woman in the team along with seven boys. Rohan started his career with an asset management fund, Washington Square, right after completing college in 2004, where he grew the asset base from $50 million to $750 million over five years, moving on to Aladdin Capital, a large US-based hedge fund, where he led the $1 billion acquisition of Solent Capital.

In 2011, the couple launched their first start-up Pouring Pounds, a B2B cashback business. I told Rohan that we should do something more in the same field,” says Bhargava. The UK-based cashback and voucher website today works with 2,500 popular brands such as Tesco, Debenhams, M&S, Expedia, and Argos.

“We thought that this would do remarkably well in India, as people are looking for ways to save money in our country. Back then, CashKaro had a small one-room office in Gurugram and a team of five people. In the six years of its existence, CashKaro has offered cashback on over 1,500 sites including Amazon. in, Flipkart, Shopclues and Myntra.

“We have given almost Rs 1 billion cashback to our customers in real-time till now!” says Bhargava. CashKaro gives up to 80% of this commission to the user as cashback and keeps the rest. Bhargava says there were several meetings with the investors and retailers to build CashKaro.

She says, they introduced the concept of cashback in Indian e-commerce and it took a while to educate people about how it worked. CashKaro drew its next investment in 2015, from Kalaari Capital, raising Rs 70 million. 

Towards the end, when I asked him about our business, he said, ‘You’re giving free money to people who love to save, what’s not to love?

” That’s how the duo raised their funding from Ratan Tata the following year. From leaving London for India and doing Skype calls with their team to moving base, Rohan and Bhargava have given everything to make their coupon site work.

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