ServiceNow bets $40 million on Indian banking software specialist to expand its financial services push
TechCrunch Jagmeet Singh
ServiceNow just put $40 million into BusinessNext, an Indian banking software firm, valuing it at $700 million. It's a bet that AI-native finance software is where the growth is, not just IT ticketing.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Jagmeet Singh — read the original for the full story.
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ServiceNow made its name automating the boring but essential plumbing of corporate life: IT tickets, HR requests, approval chains. Now it wants a bigger piece of banking, and it's paying for access rather than building from scratch. The company just wrote a $40 million check for roughly 5% of BusinessNext, a Noida-based software firm that's been quietly running customer-facing systems for over 70 banks since 2002.
The numbers tell an interesting story. BusinessNext pulled in about $32 million in revenue last year and is profitable, with half of that money coming from outside India. Its client list includes the Reserve Bank of India, State Bank of India, and HDFC Bank, which is not a small-time roster. Yet ServiceNow's $40 million values the whole company at $700 million, nearly quadruple its $181 million valuation from 2021. That's a lot of multiple expansion for a company most people outside Indian banking circles have never heard of.
CEO Nishant Singh was candid about the calculus: BusinessNext picked ServiceNow over financial investors specifically to borrow its sales machinery in markets where BusinessNext has little presence. That's the real trade here. ServiceNow gets a partner whose software handles the messy, regulated, customer-facing side of banking — the part ServiceNow's own back-office automation tools don't really touch — while BusinessNext gets to plug into a much bigger distribution network. Singh's framing, that this is a partnership
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
I'll say the quiet part out loud: this is ServiceNow buying an AI story it didn't build, because renaming yourself and rewriting your stack around agents, like BusinessNext did in 2022, reads a lot better to enterprise buyers than admitting your platform was bolted together over twenty years. Smart move for both sides, but let's not pretend $40 million for 5% isn't mostly about optics and distribution rather than some radical banking-AI breakthrough.
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