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For decades, a typical CFO job description looked like this: close the books, keep the company compliant, manage cash, and make sure the numbers add up. Today, this role is shifting dramatically. Whether it's cybersecurity, M&A, ESG, or even IT, it eventually lands on the CFO's desk. This is because each of these functions eventually has a financial implication. Whether it is evaluating the cost of a new technology stack, assessing the risks of an acquisition, or weighing the fallout from a cybersecurity breach, CFOs today need to look beyond the numbers. They must understand how the entire business works and have a clear point of view when making critical decisions. But at MoEngage, this has never really been a shift. It has been the norm for much of the company’s journey, and at the centre of it has been its CFO Narasimha Reddy, who joined MoEngage in 2015, when it was still a 10-15-person startup. Over the last decade, MoEngage has faced several moments that have tested its CFO might. These episodes range from raising funds to convincing the sales team to sell a pricing model they weren't sure about to deciding which country the company should call home. Reddy was in the room for all of it and, more often than not, pushed decisions that finance leaders are not traditionally expected to make on their own. Today, MoEngage serves more than 1,300 consumer brands globally, including Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Flipkart, Domino’s and OYO, among others. The company raised $280 Mn in its Series F round last year, crossed nearly $100 Mn in annual recurring revenue (ARR), and claimed profitability in the December quarter of 2025. Reddy, who has been central to all of this, now has a remit that extends well beyond finance, with strategy, HR and partnerships also reporting to him. For The CFO Code series, Inc42 caught up with Narasimha Reddy, board member, CFO and head of strategy at MoEngage, for an exclusive conversation. Reddy spoke in detail about the toughest stretch of MoEngage’s ten-year fundraising journey, why he believes global compliance structures should remain simple, his take on AI, and what he thinks will set the next generation of CFOs apart. The Making Of A Startup CFO Reddy joined MoEngage after stints at UBS and Continuum Energy. His decision to join the company was also personal. Founder and CEO Raviteja Dodda was his roommate while they prepared for the IIT entrance exam, and they stayed in touch over the years. When Dodda started his venture, Reddy joined. Eleven years later, he remains at MoEngage full-time, with finance being just one of the four functions that he oversees. In an interview with Inc42, Reddy shared that when he joined MoEngage, it was still finding its footing, and there was little room for defined job descriptions. At that juncture, Reddy’s technical and financial training shaped his view of what a finance leader should do. “In new-age companies, especially at an early stage, the role of a CFO is much broader, requiring an understanding of the entire business and how functions intersect to drive growth, product economics, capital allocation and stakeholder value,” Reddy said. This thesis was tested when MoEngage faced a difficult financial period in 2016-2017. Reddy shared that during this time, the company struggled to raise its Series B round because of limited capital availability in the market. “You can’t continue investing in growth in the same way when capital availability is limited. So the question becomes: how do you get closer to profitability, even if you’re not profitable yet? We did multiple things to achieve that,” Reddy said. To deal with it, Reddy pushed for moving the company’s enterprise customers from monthly postpaid contracts to annual prepaid plans, even offering discounts in some cases, to bring cash into the business upfront. Reddy said he and the founder spent considerable time with large customers to make that shift. As a result, the move brought in enough cash to sustain growth and buy time until its next round. Under Reddy’s leadership, MoEngage also raised venture debt outside a financing round, an unconventional move at the time given its limited cash cushion. The company eventually raised its Series B in 2018, three years after its Series A. Reddy also shared two instances where he had to push through decisions that the rest of the company initially resisted. The first was moving Indian customers from monthly payments to annual upfront payments. MoEngage’s sales team was sceptical that Indian customers would agree. To prove that it was possible, Reddy joined the sales call with MoEngage’s largest customer at the time and closed the first such deal himself, which eventually became the norm. The second was introducing price escalation clauses, which meant customers would pay more each year as the product evolved. The sales team initially resisted, fearing it would make negotiations harder. Reddy said he convinced the team by showing how larger global SaaS companies structure their pricing. His broader lesson was that leaders need to prove that a new approach works and use data and industry benchmarks to get the rest of the team on board. MoEngage’s Homecoming In January 2026, the National Company Law Tribunal's Bengaluru bench approved the merger of MoEngage Inc, the company's US-based parent entity, into its Indian arm, MoEngage India Private Limited, a process also known as a reverse flip. Reddy shared that when the company was formed, the US as the home ground was a straightforward choice. “Our capital and its early customers were both concentrated there, and Indian public markets were not yet open to loss-making, high-growth companies,” said Reddy. That changed as SEBI eased listing norms, removing the requirement for three years of prior profitability, and as Indian investors grew more comfortable backing new-age, high-growth businesses. What tipped the decision to move MoEngage back to India, Reddy said, was less about India's markets opening up and more about how he'd come to see the US ones behave. “If you look at US public markets, people are more sentiment-driven and not really financially driven,” Reddy stated, pointing to how capital has concentrated around AI in recent years even as companies with strong cash flows and growth outside that category struggle to attract the same attention. According to him, India offered a steadier home to MoEngage. Measuring AI By The Productivity It Unlocks When asked about AI, Reddy shared that the question should not be whether AI as a whole is delivering an ROI but what AI is doing for each function, and whether that improvement is worth what the company is spending on it. “Finance teams, for instance, could ask whether AI allows one person managing 200 accounts to handle 250 or 350 without a corresponding increase in headcount. Engineering could look at whether a feature that once took a month can now be shipped in two weeks,” Reddy noted. According to him, companies should cap their spend and then measure whether the productivity justifies the investment. Sharing an internal mechanism, Reddy said MoEngage does not licence one AI tool uniformly across the company. More expensive models go to a smaller set of people within each function, who can extract the most value from complex tasks, while lower-cost licences cover simpler day-to-day use across the rest of the team. Reddy, however, does not see AI as a replacement for human judgement, but a tool that can do the legwork before the judgement call is made. “Consider entering a new market. AI can help answer almost every question around it, from market size and competition to potential revenue and the investment required. But whether the company should enter that market, and how much capital it should commit, remains a human decision,” Reddy said. Rise Of The New CFO For Reddy, the CFO of the future cannot afford to sit on the sidelines and explain decisions after they have been made. The role, he believes, is moving much closer to the heart of the business, with CFOs expected to help decide where the company should place its bets, how those bets should be measured and when it is time to walk away. According to him, this is only possible by having a framework for investment decisions and defined rules of the game the company wants to play. “If I am investing in some new idea or some new market, it is important to have a framework for how you would evaluate it. Should I have a two-year gestation period or an 18-month gestation period? What do those results mean?” Reddy said. Reddy also iterated that stakeholder value cannot remain a CEO-only responsibility. Finance has a seat at that table too, and the CFO needs to have a point of view on the decisions that shape the company’s long-term value. When asked how he sees the CFO’s role evolving, Reddy pointed out that, since 2022, investors have become less willing to reward growth at any cost. He cited the Rule of 40, a widely used SaaS benchmark that combines a company’s revenue growth rate with its profit margin, as a useful measure of sustainable growth. He said that founders who keep burning 30-40% of revenue even as growth slows from 60% to 40% are increasingly out of step with investor expectations. Reddy also shared that he believes tomorrow's CFOs will need enough understanding of emerging tools to know where technology can improve productivity, automate manual work, and make the finance function more efficient. That becomes particularly relevant as AI starts taking over parts of traditional finance work. The future CFO, then, is less an accountant with a bigger title and more a business leader with a finance lens. In Reddy’s view, numbers still matter, but the CFO’s job is to decide what the numbers should help the company do next.
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