Startup Originals Team
Sometimes, the biggest ideas come from personal setbacks. For Sarika Shetty, a rejected home loan became the starting point of a powerful fintech innovation. In 2022, she co-founded RentenPe in Mumbai with a clear mission: turn rent payments into financial power.
If you’re tracking India’s most innovative fintech startups and the real problems they are solving, this is a founder story worth knowing.
The Problem No One Was Solving
Despite having a stable career as Vice President of Sales and Marketing at BMW, a strong income, and years of consistent rent payments, Sarika’s home loan application was rejected. The bank told her she was “overexposed” due to existing car loans and asked her to pay one off before they would approve the home loan.
Her argument was simple. The money she would save from not paying rent could easily cover a home loan EMI. But the bank’s system had no way to account for her rental payment history.
That’s when she realized a massive gap in India’s financial system.
Over 275 million middle-class Indians and around 40 million upper-middle-class Indians live in rented homes. Rent is often the single largest monthly expense, eating up nearly 30% of income in tier-1 cities. Yet traditional credit systems like CIBIL completely ignore it. Only EMIs and credit card payments count.
Millions of Indians pay rent on time every single month. But this financial discipline is invisible to lenders.
The Idea: Turn Rent Into a Credit Asset
Instead of accepting the system, Sarika decided to change it.
After consulting with Ernst and Young, the Reserve Bank of India, banks, property owners, and tenants, she launched RentenPe in 2022.
The platform introduced two breakthrough products:
India’s first Rent Credit Score, called R Score. This is an alternative credit score built entirely from structured rent payment data. The more timely and consistent a tenant’s rent payments are, the higher their R Score gets.
A digital Residence Card, called R Card. This acts as a digital rental passport that stores a tenant’s verified ID, KYC details, rent payment history, and R Score in one place. A tenant can simply show their R Card to a new landlord or a bank to establish credibility.
RentenPe tracks timely rent payments and converts them into a structured financial record, similar to how EMI repayments build a traditional credit history.
Why This Matters for Urban India
For most urban Indians, rent is the largest monthly expense and a strong indicator of financial discipline. Yet it has never been used by lenders to assess creditworthiness.
RentenPe changes that by making rent a measurable financial asset, helping users build credit without needing loans or credit cards, and bringing millions of renters into the formal financial ecosystem.
According to EY Parthenon research, structured rent repayment data over 18 to 24 months can be considered as an additional parameter for mortgage approvals. Some NBFCs and banks have already expressed that with over six months of verified rent payment data from RentenPe, they could implement a “rent pay pull” similar to traditional credit pulls when approving home loans.
This is not a small shift. It has the potential to reshape how home loans are evaluated in India.
Who Benefits the Most
RentenPe is especially powerful for:
Young professionals who have just moved to a new city for work
First-time earners with no existing credit history
Salaried individuals who pay rent regularly but have never taken a loan or used a credit card
Freelancers and gig workers who struggle to prove income stability
It gives them a starting point to access home loans, personal loans, credit cards, and better rental deals. A high R Score can unlock pre-approved home loans and low-interest lending products through RentenPe’s partnerships with NBFCs and fintech companies.
How RentenPe Works in Practice
The platform is available on both Play Store and App Store. Tenants can make rent payments directly through UPI, net banking, credit cards, or debit cards at some of the lowest processing fees in the industry.
Once a tenant starts paying through RentenPe, the app tracks consistency, builds their R Score, and stores everything on their digital R Card.
For landlords, the platform provides verified tenant profiles, payment histories, court record checks, hometown verification, and KYC data. This gives landlords complete visibility and reduces the risk of defaults.
RentenPe also offers rental loans up to ₹10 lakh for tenants facing salary delays or financial emergencies, along with security deposit loans with easy repayment options.
The platform even rewards positive behaviour. Tenants paying rent of ₹10,000 and above can earn rewards through activities like Spin the Wheel, Scratch Cards, and quizzes. Those paying over ₹20,000 per month can earn up to one month’s free rent after ten consecutive timely payments.
The Numbers So Far
Since its launch on Play Store and App Store, RentenPe has connected over 50,000 users including both tenants and landlords across India. The platform has processed more than ₹50 crore in rental payments.
RentenPe was also recognised as the “Emerging Startup of the Year in Fintech” at the Economic Times Entrepreneur Awards, a significant validation for a startup solving a problem that most people didn’t even know existed.
The platform currently supports tenants paying monthly rents ranging from ₹10,000 to ₹2 lakh and is expanding into major cities including Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata, Delhi-NCR, and Ahmedabad.
From Rejection to Reinvention
Sarika Shetty holds a B.Com from Mumbai University and an MBA in Entrepreneurship and Leadership from Golden Gate University in San Francisco. Before RentenPe, she spent years in the luxury automotive industry, rising to VP level at BMW.
Her journey is not just about building a startup. It is about challenging a broken system.
She turned a personal rejection into a scalable solution for millions of Indians who face the same invisible barrier: paying rent faithfully for years, but having nothing to show for it when they finally want to buy a home.
What Should Startups and Founders Take Away?
For entrepreneurs watching India’s fintech space, RentenPe’s story carries some important signals:
Problems are often hidden in everyday experiences. Rent is something millions deal with monthly, yet nobody had thought to make it count financially.
You don’t always need to create new behaviour. Sometimes you just need a better way to measure what people are already doing.
Fintech innovation is about inclusion, not just technology. The real opportunity lies in bringing underserved segments into the formal financial system.
Alternative credit scoring is a growing global trend. Canada, the US, and the UAE are all moving towards including rent in credit assessments. India is next.
India’s fintech ecosystem is expanding rapidly, and startuporiginals.in will keep tracking the founders building real solutions for real problems.
The Bottom Line
From being denied a home loan to helping thousands of Indians build the credit they need to get one, Sarika Shetty’s journey shows that sometimes rejection is not failure. It is the beginning of a better solution.
The rent you pay today should help you buy a home tomorrow. That is the simple, powerful idea behind RentenPe.
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