OneStack Raises ₹12.5 Cr to Take Co-op Banks Onto UPI

OneStack, a fintech infrastructure company that sells technology to cooperative banks, has raised ₹12.5 crore. New investor Shepherd's Hill put money in alongside existing backers Pentathlon Ventures and AVNM Ventures.

The company says its partner banks now run UPI directly with NPCI.

What OneStack says it has built

OneStack says cooperative banks using its platform are live as both issuers and acquirers on UPI, directly with NPCI and under their own bank handles. In plain terms, such a bank can issue UPI IDs to its own customers, sign up its own merchants and settle those payments itself, instead of routing them through a larger bank or an app. OneStack says that lets the bank keep the customer relationship, the transaction data and any fee income. The company has not named any bank that is live in this way, and NPCI has made no public statement on it that we could find, so the claim rests on OneStack's word. Founder and CEO Amit Kapoor, who earlier co-founded and led the payments company Airpay, said the setup puts the bank, not an intermediary, at the centre of every payment.

The funding history

OneStack says it has raised more than ₹45 crore across four rounds, with this one included. Public reports show a $2 million round led by Pentathlon Ventures in March 2025 and a later round in February 2026 led by Samved VC and Silicon Road Ventures. The new money goes into expansion across cooperative banks and NBFCs, and into products for payments, core banking and regulatory compliance. OneStack also says it has built tools for NBFCs covering customer verification and fraud reporting.

Reach: more than 200 banks, same as before

OneStack says it serves more than 200 banks, including state cooperative banks, district central cooperative banks and urban cooperative banks. That is the same figure the company gave when we covered its Series A in March 2025, so the headline count has not moved in twenty months. Two new channels are meant to change that. The company says it has partnered with a large private-sector bank that sponsors more than 250 cooperative banks, though it does not name the bank, and it has been onboarded as a technology provider on Sahakar Sarathi, the shared-services entity promoted by NABARD, NCDC and rural cooperative banks.

Whether those channels turn into live banks is the thing to watch.

The UPI fee question

OneStack's pitch leans on the new fee on UPI merchant payments. Under NPCI's FAQs of 15 September, specified person-to-merchant payments above ₹2,000 attract a 0.4% fee, capped at ₹300 for payments of ₹75,000 and above. Railways, telecom, insurance and fuel pay a flat ₹5, and small merchants receiving up to ₹1 lakh a month through UPI QR codes pay nothing. The release describes the fee as in force, but its status is less clear. NPCI set 15 October as the start date, the Supreme Court declined an interim stay in September, and later reports said the rollout could be pushed back, as we noted when the rollout was likely to be deferred. We could not confirm that it is live today. Industry estimates of the yearly pool run from ₹10,000 crore to about ₹20,600 crore, and our explainer on who gets paid from UPI fees shows how it is shared.

A large market with thin volumes

The release points to a big addressable base. It cites NABARD's report of 34 state cooperative banks and 351 district central cooperative banks with nearly 15,900 branches as of March 2025, and RBI data showing 1,457 urban cooperative banks with ₹7.38 lakh crore in assets. In my view, the fee story is the weaker half of OneStack's case. Most UPI merchant payments are small and sit below the ₹2,000 line, and a cooperative bank earns on both sides only when its own customers pay its own merchants. The stronger case is that these banks need shared technology for onboarding, cybersecurity and compliance, and that is a steadier business than a fee that may be postponed.