Helps street vendors who repaid one PM SVANidhi loan get the next one
TL;DR Vendorladder works a gap in India's street-vendor loan scheme. Plenty of vendors repay their first PM SVANidhi loan and never take the second. Field staff and a chat-app assistant get their records, repayments and applications ready for the next tranche, and banks and city bodies pay per vendor moved up.
PM SVANidhi is the biggest small-ticket loan programme for street vendors. It gives three loans in sequence, ₹15,000, ₹25,000 and ₹50,000, and about 1.2 crore loans worth ₹19,711 Cr have gone out[1]. The ladder thins fast though. The portal shows 80.2 lakh first loans, 30.7 lakh second loans and 9.5 lakh third loans[1].
Some of that is timing, since tonnes of vendors are still repaying. But 48.8 lakh first loans have been repaid and only 30.7 lakh second loans went out[1]. By my arithmetic that's about 18 lakh vendors who closed a first loan and stopped. Banks also returned 10.8 lakh applications[1].
So why do they drop off? Nobody knows, because I found no study on it, and that is the first thing to find out.
What it does, in regulatory terms: a lending service provider and application facilitator, not a lender. Vendorladder never touches loan money. Loans go from the bank to the vendor's account, repayments go straight back and the lender pays the fee, as RBI's 2025 digital lending rules require of NBFC partners[2]. Bank partners follow parallel rules.
A vendor joins through a city's vending committee or a bank branch. The chat-app assistant talks in the vendor's language, tracks the current loan, sends repayment reminders on the day the vendor picks and logs UPI takings so there's a record to show. When the loan is nearly repaid, a field worker checks documents, fixes the reasons banks send applications back and walks the vendor to the next tranche.
The seed pitched decentralised microfinance, so I reframed it. In India crowd lending is legal only through RBI-registered P2P platforms that cap one lender's exposure to one borrower at ₹50,000 and bar any guarantee of returns[3], and RBI opposes legalising crypto assets[4]. For street vendors the money already sits in a government scheme - what's missing is help climbing it.
Vendors pay nothing. Banks pay per second or third loan sanctioned, because a vendor who repays is a cheap customer to keep. City bodies and state urban missions pay per vendor case, since the tranche targets are theirs to meet. There are no public fee benchmarks that I could find. My test prices are ₹300–800 per sanctioned loan from banks and ₹150–400 per case from cities.
The portal now shows up-to-date loan counts by tranche, last updated in October 2026[1], so every city and bank can see the drop-off. RBI's November 2025 directions put service-provider duties in one document[2], which makes a compliant design much clearer. And one merchant QR network alone reports 1.7 crore merchant partners on its QR network[5], so a good chunk of vendors now have a digital record of takings to show a bank.
The narrowest real figure is the ladder gap - about 18 lakh vendors who repaid a first loan without taking a second, by my arithmetic from the portal[1]. For adjacent context, the scheme has disbursed ₹19,711 Cr in total[1]. That QR network says it has facilitated over ₹14,600 Cr in business loans for merchants[5], which tells you lenders will fund small traders who have digital records.
Merchant QR networks offer business loans to their partners, one to 1.7 crore of them[5], but they go after shops with steady QR flows rather than the scheme's ladder. Lending-infrastructure firms build lending infrastructure for underbanked customers through partners[6]. P2P lending platforms are the regulated crowd route, but the caps hold them back[3]. City vending committees help vendors apply, unevenly. Nobody I found gets paid to move vendors up the tranches.
| Difficulty | Moderate (50/100) |
| Starting capital | ₹60 L–1.2 Cr |
| Time to launch | 6–9 months |
The software is light. The real work is in the field, where vendors move around, change numbers and don't trust strangers who ask about loans. Contracts with banks and cities are slow and a government scheme can change its rules or end, which is not a fun thing to build on. You also need to learn why vendors drop off before you know what to fix.
Not a lending licence, because Vendorladder never lends. You work under contract for banks and NBFCs.
Building this outside India? The categories above usually have a local equivalent, so check with your own regulator.
Don't let AI judge whether a vendor deserves a loan. That's the bank's call, and the vendor's own records are often patchy.
Want to work out the AI layer for Vendorladder? Talk to Yash →
I'd back a founder who has worked with urban local bodies, vendor unions or a bank's financial-inclusion team. If you want a pure software business then this isn't it. Before anything else, prove in one city that you can move 300 repaid vendors to a second loan in 90 days and that one bank will pay for it.
Plan for about ₹60 L–1.2 Cr, mostly field workers across a few cities and the chat-app assistant.
No lending licence, but you must work as a lending service provider under contract with each lender, and you can't charge vendors a fee.
Yes, wherever governments run small loan schemes for informal traders. Check local rules on loan agents and data protection before you start.
The free Vendorladder validation kit has the line-by-line capital breakdown, the effort scoring, the digital lending and data-protection checklist, a 14-day validation sprint with pass/fail targets, a 90-day launch plan, 10 interview questions for vendors, banks and cities, and 5 assumptions to test. Download the kit →
Thinking about building Vendorladder or something close to it? The make-or-break work is finding out why vendors stop after one loan before you design the fix, and that's the kind of thing I help founders with. If you need a hand, you know where to find me. Talk to Yash →
For illustration only. Names are fictional and ideas hypothetical; sourced facts are real but may be out of date. Nothing here is legal, financial or professional advice, and Yash Khatri is not personally liable for any use of it. Read the full disclaimer.