Apna Paisa is a price and feature comparison service provider that empowers consumers to take an informed decision. The portal serves as a comparison engine for a wide range of products like home loans, personal loans, car loans, business loans, credit cards and insurance products like life insurance and general insurance policies.

In mid 1999, a friend of a friend managed to contact Harsh Vardhan Roongta, Founder and CEO, Apna Paisa regarding an intricate query on a loan. Harsh was able to solve this query after checking around with his in house team in ICICI (where he was working). But he realized that if the consumer would have directly asked the team he would not have got an answer. Also of the plight of a retail consumer (for whom his loan is no less important than a $100 million loan for a top corporate) having to scrounge round for information or guidance, while a similarly placed corporate consumer had full access to expertise, hit him hard. The key to delivering expertise to the consumer was a scalable medium which the internet provided. This is how the idea of Apna Paisa came about. The rest started when Harsh narrated the idea to his ex ICICI colleague Kiran Nadkarni, who had established his own venture firm Jumpstartup Venture. Sequoia Capital and JAFCO Asia invested in Apna Paisa.

Today, Apna Paisa.com attracts around 500,000 unique visitors with about 1.5 million page impressions every month. More than a million consumers have bought a product after using this comparison engine. The company regularly updates pricing, and features information of all products that are covered to enable consumers to save money.

The revenue comes mainly from referrals to various banks, housing finance companies and insurers (and their agents respectively) across the country and advertisements on the site. The value proposition that the company offers for referral clients and advertisers is that they get access to consumers who have compared the products and services across various parameters and are ready to buy.

On the other hand, consumers can access its comprehensive customized comparison quotes, which are rendered in simple, user-friendly and appealing manner. Consumers save time as they get a one-stop shop for researching, comparing and buying online as well as they are able to contact the service providers for virtually all the products in the market. "All the products in the full search results tables are displayed in a completely unbiased manner," says Roongta.

However, Apna Paisa is not Harsh's first entrepreneurial venture. The entrepreneurial bug bit him for the first time in 1990, when along with two of his ICICI colleagues, he started a boutique investment banking firm specializing in syndicating structured finance transaction. He headed the firm's specialized executive search division before rejoining ICICI in 1998 to take P&L responsibility for launching and building the retail lending business.

After a successful two years at ICICI, history repeated itself and he quit ICICI in February 2000 with two of his colleagues to be the CEO of a startup company, Apnaloan. The company became one of India's largest distributor of credit cards and home loans. Apnaloan's investors included Rediff, ING Vysya Bank, SIDBI Venture. In 2007 Apnaloan metamorphosed into Apnapaisa.