Excitel posts ₹40 crore profit in FY26, targets growth in subscribers, Wi-Fi 6 gear deals: CEO
Homegrown Internet Service Provider (ISP), Excitel Broadband, which became profitable in the financial year 2026 (FY26), said it is targeting to grow its subscriber base by 20% and place new Wi-Fi 6 gear deals with vendors to deliver premium services.
“In the last two years, we have been on a journey to optimise and focus on sustainability, and achieve profitable growth in business. Fundamentally, we have withdrawn from some markets where we could not scale up,” Excitel’s new Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Varun Pasricha told ETTelecom exclusively.
The company is instead focusing on deepening its market penetration in core cities, which include Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Lucknow, and Kanpur.
“We are reusing assets like routers, removing non-core cities, and, in general, running very disciplined operations. The combination of all of this along with revenue growth has ensured that we have gone from losing ₹74 crore in FY25, to making a profit of ₹40 crore in FY26,” Pasricha said.
The nearly 10-year-old company’s revenue grew by 2.5% year-on-year to ₹530 crore in the financial year that ended March 31, 2026. Its EBITDA – or core operating profit – improved by 108% year-on-year to ₹73 crore.
However, its subscriber base remained largely unchanged at 1 million. The chief executive though said Excitel is targeting to grow its subscriber base by 20% to 1.2 million by FY27-28, and scale it to 10 million subscribers in the long-term, on the back of IPTV offerings and a large untapped potential in dense urban markets.
Excitel is the fourth-largest fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) internet player, competing with market incumbents Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel, and ACT Fibernet.
Jio and Airtel control nearly 56% of India’s wireline market by subscribers, according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s (TRAI) industry data collated for April 2026.
Pasricha said Excitel is pivoting from a value-first to a premium services-led strategy to support its business growth ambitions and solidify its foothold in the market.
“We want to delight the user with a more premiumised product. So we are working with OEMs to make sure the latest and greatest technologies in terms of CPEs, whether it is a Wi-Fi 6 router or a mesh router, are available to our consumer,” he added. “This will be an absolute priority for us.”
Excitel has a major business with multinational vendors, including the Dutch GX Group’s India unit, Finnish Nokia, and the US-based Belden.
“Going forward, we would be upgrading what we buy. We would be buying more high-end gear, including Wi-Fi 6 and mesh routers mostly from these OEMs only,” he said. “We are looking at Wi-Fi 6 routers in a very big way. In our tests, Wi-Fi 6 routers have seamlessly delivered 1 gig speeds in a typical house environment.”
Pasricha took over from Vivek Raina in February, who quit the company to pursue external opportunities. However, this has not led to any changes in the shareholding pattern.
Excitel was co-founded in 2015 by a team of Indian and European entrepreneurs, including Raina, Nikolai Gorchilov, Victor Francess, and Plamen Petkov.
It is a Series C internet broadband company and raised capital from European private equity and venture capital firms to fund its expansion across India.
Pasricha said Excitel received several non-binding funding offers until Q3FY27, but it had become profitable by then. “Given where we are today, we are not looking at a small fundraise. So we do not need funds to support our immediate growth for at least 1-2 years.”
