As India’s largest cash logistics and ATM management company, CMS services 72,000+ ATMs across 97% of the country’s districts. In Uttarakhand, it airlifts currency notes to the Kedarnath temple at 11,755 ft. Every month, its fleet of 4,500 vans and mini-vans trundle over a million kilometres to ensure that from Ladakh to Kanyakumari, cash keeps moving.

But here’s the irony. Cash was supposed to be dead, especially in a digital payments era where, at last count, over 18 billion transactions were processed monthly through the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). The digital revolution — etched into QR codes pasted on roadside stalls and embedded in every payment app — has yet to unseat the enduring presence of Indian banknotes.

It’s against this paradox that this unglamorous enterprise has grown quietly and steadily. Rajiv Kaul, who spent the early years of his career at Microsoft — eventually becoming one of its youngest country managers — joined CMS in 2009. It was, in hindsight, a contrarian bet. At the time, cash logistics was a fragmented business with little tech, little transparency, and even less investor interest. “When I finished 15 years, I asked HR how many others had done the same,” Kaul says. Turns out 10% of the company’s workforce had. “These are people who’ve grown up with the company,” he says.

But the defining moment for CMS came about in 2016 when the government invalidated 86% of the nation’s currency notes overnight. The announcement sent the country into a tailspin — and many assumed it would bury cash logistics once and for all. What followed was not a pivot, but a consolidation — a slow, relentless transformation that saw CMS go from regional transporter of cash to a national-scale platform, delivering not just physical currency but trust, uptime, compliance, and capital efficiency.

The numbers speak for themselves: five consecutive years of 20%+ earnings growth; RoCE of 25.1%; ₹1,850 crore in new contracts in FY24, nearly double of FY23; zero debt. That’s impressive for a company that did not raise a rupee in capital when it got listed. “This business has never taken public money. It’s all self-generated. That’s why we are even more hardcore about how we spend it,” says Kaul, the CEO of CMS, which is at No. 22 on Fortune India’s 100 Emerging Stars list.

In an era where many founders define success through valuation, Kaul has built CMS on the less glamorous, more enduring metrics of unit economics, market share, and RoCE. “Our filters are very clear,” he says. “If we’re not a market leader, or can’t be a profitable leader, we get out. There are companies making 5–7% Ebitda margins and still getting good valuations. That’s fine for them. But for us, we aspire for 15%; 8-10% is sustainable but anything below is not worth it.”

Rank 22

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