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Apurv Bansal

Apurv Bansal is the co-founder and chief executive of Zenskar, a New York-based platform for billing, invoicing, and revenue recognition aimed at business-to-business software companies [1][2][3]. He holds a Bachelor of Technology in civil engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and a Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School [2]. Before founding Zenskar, he worked as an associate consultant at Bain & Company, co-founded the e-commerce venture Wishpicker, which was later acquired by Snapdeal, held product management roles at Snapdeal and Google, and worked in investment roles at Elevation Capital [2]. He describes Zenskar as his second company, having started and sold an earlier business-to-consumer e-commerce venture roughly a decade before Zenskar's founding [7].

Bansal traces the idea for Zenskar to his time at Google, where he worked on Google Pay and other divisions and observed that even a company as large as Google relied on large internal engineering teams to build in-house billing and revenue-operations tools rather than using third-party software, because most commercial billing tools had been designed around older subscription-based pricing models rather than usage-based ones [4][5]. He co-founded Zenskar with Saurabh, who had separately built in-house billing systems at two previous companies and found no existing vendor met his needs, a shared frustration that led the two to start the company in the summer of 2022 [4][7]. Bansal has argued that the shift toward usage-based and AI-driven pricing models was accelerating at the time, which gave the founders conviction that demand for a dedicated billing and revenue-recognition platform would grow [4].

At Zenskar, Bansal positions the product as covering the full "order to cash" cycle, including billing, payment collection, revenue recognition, and reporting on software-as-a-service metrics, with a customer-quoted CPQ module in development [7]. He explains that the company targets business-to-business firms whose pricing is complicated either by sales-led deal terms, such as discounts, rebates, and milestones, or by usage-based components tied to metrics like API calls, data storage, or transaction volumes [7]. According to Bansal, Zenskar typically sits between a client's customer relationship management system and its enterprise resource planning system, pulling contract and usage data to generate invoices, recognize revenue, and push journal entries back into the client's financial systems [5][7]. He has said the company initially focused on software clients, particularly those with consumption-based pricing, before planning to expand into sectors such as banking, telecommunications, and logistics, and that Zenskar charges customers a fee based on the volume of revenue processed through the platform [6]. He has noted that companies generating upward of about ten million dollars in revenue tend to face the greatest billing complexity, though even pre-revenue companies have approached Zenskar to address pricing and billing issues before launch [7].

By early 2025, Bansal reported that Zenskar had grown to about 38 employees, roughly split between engineering and design staff and go-to-market roles, and was nearing 100 customers, with most of that growth occurring over the preceding year and a half [7]. He has attributed the company's growth to outbound sales efforts alongside a rising share of inbound leads driven by word of mouth and customer referrals [7]. Bansal has also argued publicly that chief financial officers should extend their remit beyond financial reporting to help shape sales, marketing, product, and customer-success strategy across a company, contending that a CFO who focuses solely on financial management is not adding full value to the business [5].

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Insights & ideas

Bansal argues that billing complexity in B2B software stems from two sources: sales-led motions, where reps craft custom discounts, credits, rebates and milestones that finance then struggles to invoice and recognize revenue for, and usage-based pricing, where charges depend on variable metrics like API calls, storage, or transactions [1]. He contends that legacy billing tools were built for subscription pricing from over a decade ago and simply cannot handle usage-based models, which is why even companies as large as Google built billing in-house with dedicated engineering teams rather than adopt existing tools [2]. He sees usage-based pricing becoming increasingly mainstream, accelerated by AI tailwinds, and believes this shift requires real operational change beyond software adoption, since contracts can no longer specify fixed quantities and instead require metering, data collection, and coordination between engineering, RevOps, and finance [2]. On market dynamics, he frames the crowded billing and revenue automation space as a natural outcome of a large, real problem attracting capital and competition, with defensibility and timing determining which players succeed [2]. He also holds that Zenskar's core value lies in sitting between CRM and ERP systems to unify billing, collections, revenue recognition, and SaaS metrics reporting, and notes that even pre-revenue companies now seek this kind of automation before launch [1].

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