₹96 Crore for Acquisition and Retention. Filed as One Line

NoPaperForms, the company behind Meritto, filed updated IPO papers with SEBI last week. Fresh issue of ₹375 crore, plus an offer for sale from Info Edge.

The use of funds section is where it gets interesting.

₹148 crore for technology and cloud infrastructure. ₹96 crore for customer acquisition and retention. The rest to general corporate purposes and acquisitions.

Most coverage stopped at the headline number. The detail worth reading is how that second line is written.

SaaS customer acquisition and retention as a single budget

The ₹96 crore is described as expanding sales, marketing and customer success functions.

Three departments. One budget line. One stated purpose.

That sounds like an accounting detail. It is not. Most SaaS companies below IPO scale do the opposite, and it costs them.

Marketing owns leads and reports on volume. Sales owns closing and reports on bookings. Customer success owns renewals and reports on retention. Three teams, three budgets, three sets of numbers that each look fine while the number the founder actually cares about does not move.

You know the shape of it. Marketing hits target. Sales says the leads are bad. Customer success says the deals were oversold. Nobody is lying. Everyone is optimising for the thing they are measured on, and the handoffs between them are where the revenue goes missing.

Writing acquisition and retention as one ask means treating them as one system. Whether NoPaperForms actually runs it that way internally, we cannot know from a filing. But the way you ask for money tends to reflect the way you plan to spend it.

The part that should make founders uncomfortable

Here is what makes this more than a nice observation.

NoPaperForms is profitable. Revenue grew about 25% to ₹115.6 crore in FY26. Profit rose sixfold to ₹11.9 crore. They are reportedly the only profitable Indian company in their category above ₹50 crore in revenue.

So they are not raising to survive. They are raising to go faster.

And the thing they are buying to go faster is distribution capacity. Sales, marketing, customer success. People.

That tracks with their cost structure. Employee benefit expenses were ₹60.4 crore of ₹111.5 crore in total expenses. Over half the cost base is already people, and the plan is to add more.

Which tells you where the constraint sits. Not the product. Not the market. The ability to reach customers and keep them.

That is a good problem to have at IPO scale. It is a much worse problem to have at ₹10 crore, when there is no public market to solve it for you.

One line, not three

The practical version of this for a company nowhere near an IPO.

One number across the whole journey. Pick the metric that spans the entire path from first touch to renewal. Revenue retained from customers acquired in a given period is a reasonable one. If marketing, sales and account management can all point at the same figure, the incentive to blame the next team downstream mostly disappears.

Own the handoffs explicitly. Most revenue leaks at the seams. Marketing to sales. Sales to onboarding. Onboarding to ongoing account management. Each of those is a moment where context gets dropped and the customer starts again. Write down who owns each transition and what has to be true for it to happen.

Fund it as one thing. If you are deciding between a second salesperson and someone to run onboarding properly, you are already thinking about it correctly. The wrong version is having those two decisions made by two people who never discuss them.

Do it before you need capital for it. This is the actual lesson. A company with ₹375 crore incoming can buy its way through a distribution problem. A company at ₹5 crore in revenue cannot. It has to build the system, which takes longer but costs less and works at any size.

What this does not prove

Worth being careful about how far to take a single filing.

One IPO document is not a trend. Companies allocate IPO proceeds for many reasons, including what reads well to investors. And note that the larger allocation here went to technology and cloud infrastructure, not to go-to-market. If you wanted to argue the opposite case, that the bigger bet is product, the numbers support you.

What is fair to say is narrower. A profitable, growing vertical SaaS company on the way to public markets treated acquisition and retention as one funded system rather than as separate departments. That is a reasonable model to copy, and copying it costs nothing.

The companies that get this right early are not the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones where nobody has to ask whose fault it is when a customer leaves, because everyone is already looking at the same number.

Common questions