Company setup
The paperwork that decides whether you can take money at all
How this works, plainly. Filings are made by licensed professionals — chartered accountants, company secretaries and lawyers — and we are not one of them. What we do is decide the structure with you, brief them, track the filings, and make sure the software and the paperwork describe the same business. That last part is the one that gets missed when the two are bought from two different places.
India
Where most founders start
Private Limited
The default if you intend to raise money. Investors can hold equity, ESOPs are possible, and compliance is heavier than an LLP.
LLP
Lower compliance and no share capital. Suited to a services business with partners and no fundraising plan.
One Person Company
A single founder who wants limited liability now and will convert later. Converts to Private Limited when it outgrows the thresholds.
GST registration
Mandatory past the turnover threshold and, in practice, required far earlier — most B2B customers will not buy without a GST invoice.
DPIIT recognition
Startup India recognition, which unlocks tax benefits, procurement relaxations and several state schemes. Free to apply for and routinely forgotten.
Trademark
Filed on the name and the mark before the launch spends money making them worth taking.
International
When your customers or investors are elsewhere
US — Delaware C-Corp
What most institutional investors expect if you are raising abroad. Brings US tax filings from day one, whether or not you have revenue.
UK — Private Limited
Fast, inexpensive, and a credible base for European customers. Straightforward for a founder who is not resident.
UAE — Free Zone
Attractive tax position and regional proximity, with a real substance requirement to plan for rather than to discover.
Singapore — Private Limited
The usual holding structure for Asian operations, with a local director requirement that has to be solved before, not after.
The holding question
Which entity owns which, and where the IP sits. Getting this wrong is expensive to reverse, and it is reversed at exactly the moment you are trying to close a round.
Money in and out
FEMA, ODI and inward remittance for an Indian founder with a foreign parent. Boring, and the single most common reason a structure has to be unwound.
Payments
Four things nobody tells you about taking money online
Getting approved is the hard part
Integrating a gateway takes days; being accepted for the category you actually trade in can take weeks, and some categories are refused outright. We plan for which gateway will approve your business before a line of checkout code is written.
The paths that break in production
Refunds, partial refunds, failed captures, duplicate webhooks, settlement delays and chargebacks. A checkout that only handles the successful path passes every test and fails in its first month.
Paying money out
Vendor payouts, commissions and refunds to bank accounts and UPI — a separate product with separate approval from collecting it, which surprises nearly everybody the first time.
Policies that match the software
Refund, privacy, shipping and terms pages are checked during gateway approval, and they have to describe what the application really does. Generic copied policies are a common rejection reason and a real liability afterwards.
Tell us where you are and where the customers are.
Those two facts decide most of the structure. Ask before you incorporate rather than after — unwinding the wrong entity costs more than setting up the right one.