In April 2021, as India was locked down during the second wave of COVID-19, three chartered accountants were spending most of their days on WhatsApp and Google Meet calls that stretched past 16 hours.
Joel Lester D'Souza, Srihari R Dhondalay, and Sidharth Ravichandran were hearing the same problem repeatedly: small business owners struggling with compliance deadlines, delayed filings, unreachable accountants, and penalty notices arriving at odd hours. At the same time, first-time founders were often unclear about what needed to be filed in the first place.
From the outside, it looked like a pandemic problem. But for the trio, it was something deeper.
Having spent years inside India's compliance system, they saw a structural gap that had been building for a long time. As India prepared for a surge of new businesses, they believed the systems meant to support them were already stretched thin.
So, they decided to build something new — without fully knowing what it would eventually become.
Five years later, RegisterKaro has incorporated more than 50,000 companies, crossed Rs 100 crore in ARR, and now helps launch over 2,500 businesses every month.
2021: A 2BHK, a whiteboard, and early chaos
In 2021, India was moving fast toward becoming one of the world's largest startup ecosystems. But the process of actually starting a company still depended on fragmented systems – WhatsApp messages, couriered documents, and endless follow-ups with regulators and consultants.
In September that year, the founders rented a two-bedroom apartment in Koramangala and turned it into their first workspace. Instead of building a full-stack platform from day one, they focused a single pain point: incorporation.
Private limited company registration, LLPs, OPCs – every form, documents, and interaction with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) became their starting point.
But the early months were far from smooth.
By the end of 2021, the team had grown to 20 people, with the founders still handling most client conversations themselves. In October 2022, RegisterKaro moved into its first formal office in Indiranagar, a milestone they describe as the moment it stopped being a side project and became a company generating Rs 20 lakh in revenue.
"We were three CAs running a company without a single salesperson for the first year. That works until it doesn't," says Srihari R Dhondalay, Co-founder.
2023-2024: The Gurugram shift
In April 2023, RegisterKaro made a strategic move from Bengaluru to Gurugram. The decision was driven by distribution. Delhi-NCR had a higher density of MSMEs and a faster flow of new incorporations. Bengaluru was where the founders were based. Gurugram was where their customers were.
“We weren't trying to disrupt anything glamorous. We just kept seeing first-time founders pay penalties for things they never knew existed. Compliance in India isn't a tax; it's a literacy problem,” says Joel D'Souza, Co-founder and CEO.
The move marked a new phase of scale. The team had crossed 100 employees and expanded its services beyond incorporation, adding Virtual office, GST registration, Udyam, trademarks, copyrights, and patents, ITR filings, and bookkeeping.
By the end of 2025, RegisterKaro had served more than 50,000 clients, was incorporating 2,500+ businesses every month, and maintained a 4.6-star Google rating across 8,000+ reviews.
2024–2025: Building tech, expanding beyond India
In May 2024, the company expanded internationally with an office in Dubai. The focus was two-fold: Indian founders expanding overseas, and NRIs or foreign founders incorporating businesses in India.
To support scale, the company invested heavily in technology. It launched a customer portal that offered real-time tracking, encrypted document storage, and direct messaging with assigned CAs and lawyers.
In 2025, the company introduced an AI voice agent for client queries, along with automated onboarding and AI-based document validation systems.
These product updates significantly improved onboarding efficiency and helped double the number of clients onboarded. The company also crossed Rs 100 crore in ARR in 2026.
What 50,000 clients taught them
Looking back, the founders distil their journey into a few lessons.
First: process matters more than personality. Early-stage energy can win customers, but systems decide whether you can scale beyond a point.
Second: trust is the real deal. Most customers, they say, are asking a version of the same question – whether filings will be handled correctly and on time.
Third: India’s next wave of founders is increasingly coming from Tier II cities. Cities like Indore, Jaipur, Coimbatore, and Bhubaneswar, are now driving a large share of repeat business.
Fourth: education is part of the product. Making compliance knowledge accessible to non-paying users is a long-term investment in building category trust.
The road ahead
India now adds more than 20,000 new companies every month. DPIIT-recognized startups crossed 55,000 in FY26, the highest ever recorded. At the same time, digitization of compliance systems has made non-compliance faster to detect — and harder to ignore.
"Our goal was never just to provide services. It was to build trust in a process that intimidates most first-time founders. Starting a business in India should be empowering. For too long, it has been overwhelming," says Sidharth Ravichandran, Co-founder.
From a Koramangala apartment in 2021 to a Rs100 crore ARR platform in 2026, RegisterKaro’s mirrors the broader shift in India’s startup ecosystem – where compliance, once an afterthought, is now becoming integral.
And in a market adding thousands of new businesses every month, that bet is only getting bigger.
(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)
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