Aarthik Labs Private Limited

A clear-eyed look at where they stood.

Aarthik Labs was building a financial-advisory platform aimed at MSMEs, small businesses that rarely get structured financial guidance built for their size. As a fintech at seed stage, the company needed early capital to build the product and reach that market, before revenue could carry those costs on its own.

For a fintech serving MSMEs, a seed-stage funding case has to do more than describe the product. A grant or seed-fund route needs a clear picture of the market gap, who the underserved small businesses are and why they are not already served, backed by a utilisation plan and financial projections that hold together under review. A screening committee that cannot see how the funding request, the plan for the money and the numbers connect will usually send an application back with questions, or not move it forward at all.

CapEasy worked with Aarthik Labs on its case for a Startup India Seed Fund (SISFS) application, starting with market-gap sizing: setting out how much of the MSME financial-advisory space was underserved and where the company’s platform fit against that gap.

From there, the team built a utilisation plan mapping the requested funds against product-build and go-to-market milestones, and financial projections aligned to the raise, so the numbers in the application matched what the company said it would do with the money. This step is where many seed-fund applications fall down: a utilisation plan that is vague about what each rupee is for, or projections that read as generic rather than tied to the specific product and market, gives a reviewing committee little to check the application against.

The proposal was then structured to the scheme’s own eligibility requirements rather than a generic pitch retrofitted for a form. SISFS applications go to a DPIIT-approved incubator’s screening committee, which weighs eligibility fit, the plan for the funds and the credibility of the projections together, so how a proposal is packaged matters nearly as much as the substance behind it.

The outcome

Aarthik Labs’ application was approved by the seed fund committee. A Seed Fund approval is the incubator committee’s sanction. Disbursement follows the scheme’s own structure, up to Rs 20 lakh as a grant or up to Rs 50 lakh as convertible debt, one route or the other and never both, released against the scheme’s due-diligence checks and compliance milestones. It is not guaranteed, and outcomes vary by applicant and by incubator.

What made it work

The application read as one coherent case rather than three documents stitched together after the fact: the market sizing, the utilisation plan and the financial projections all pointed to the same story about what the funds were for and how they would be used. For a committee reading many applications in a cycle, that kind of consistency is often what lets a proposal get a straightforward review instead of drawing follow-up queries.