Quick Take
- CA Neeraj Rohilla left Sirsa with one suitcase and a single ambition: clear India’s hardest exam.
- He co-founded Startup Advisory in Saket, New Delhi to catch first-time founders before they fall.
- His lifetime vision: build an Indian firm strong enough to stand beside the global Big Four.
In This Article
Neeraj Rohilla is the Chartered Accountant (CA) from Sirsa, Haryana who turned eleven years of audit grind into Startup Advisory, the Saket firm that backs first-time Indian founders the Big Four ignore.
His story is not just about clearing one of India’s hardest exams. It is about a boy who left a small town with a single suitcase, watched founders bleed money over broken books, and decided to build a firm that would catch them before they fell. Today, that firm serves clients across India and beyond.
StartupFeed Insight
The Neeraj Rohilla story matters because it forces a question every Indian founder eventually faces: Will you build for a quarter or for a quarter-century? With 2,12,283 Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) recognised startups in India as of January 31, 2026, and 6,789 already struck off the register per Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) data, the country has more founders than ever and more graveyards than ever. StartupFeed predicts that by 2030, at least one Indian-origin advisory firm with Startup Advisory’s CA-first model will cross Rs 100 Cr ($12 Mn) in annual revenue, proving that emotional clarity scales better than mere scale.
Where the Neeraj Rohilla dream was born
Sirsa is a tier-3 town in the southwestern corner of Haryana, roughly 280 kilometres from Delhi by road, and a world away in terms of opportunity. It is a place where the wheat fields stretch flat to the horizon, where families measure success in stable jobs and quiet pride, and where dreaming of building a national firm is considered, by most, the privilege of someone else’s child.
This is where Neeraj Rohilla grew up. Between 2008 and 2012, he attended Vivekanand Bal Mandir Senior Secondary School in Sirsa, choosing the commerce stream because numbers made sense to him in a way that words never quite did. While his classmates planned safe paths, he quietly studied the lives of Chartered Accountants. He read about ICAI exams in newspapers. He asked older cousins about articleship. He noticed something most teenagers miss: every successful business he respected was built on a foundation of careful, unglamorous financial work.
By the time he finished his Class 12 board exams, the decision was already made in his head. He would chase the CA qualification, even though the road from Sirsa to that title was long, expensive, and crowded with brighter, better-funded competition. His family supported him because that is what loving families do, but they also worried, because that too is what loving families do. Delhi was 280 kilometres away in distance and an entire universe away in cost of living.
He went anyway. He packed a single suitcase. He boarded a train. He told himself he would not return home until he had earned the right to write “CA” before his name. That promise to himself, made by a teenager with no certainty and no safety net, is where the Startup Advisory story actually begins.
About Startup Advisory
Startup Advisory is a CA-led professional services firm based in Saket, New Delhi, operating as a brand of KNAP Advisory Pvt Ltd. Co-founded by CA Neeraj Rohilla and CA Kunal Mehta, the firm offers company incorporation, DPIIT recognition, Goods and Services Tax (GST) and income tax advisory, Registrar of Companies (ROC) filings, and Virtual Chief Financial Officer (CFO) services. It serves first-time founders, Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), and Non-Resident Indian (NRI) clients across India through its official online portal.
The Delhi CA grind that forged a founder
The CA Final examination, administered by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI), is one of the most demanding professional exams in the country, with a pass percentage that has historically hovered between 10% and 20%. In the May 2026 cycle alone, only 7,931 candidates qualified out of 87,497 who appeared, a pass rate of 14.07% for both groups according to ICAI. To clear it, a student does not just need intelligence. They need years.
Neeraj Rohilla moved to Delhi as a teenager and joined V K Dhingra & Co., one of the city’s established Chartered Accountancy firms, for his articleship in February 2014. For the next four years and one month, he lived a life most people would not envy. He learned auditing on real client floors, not classrooms. He spent long hours over Schedule III financial statements, GST reconciliations, and Income Tax assessments. He absorbed how listed companies were run, how MSMEs survived, and how careless founders quietly bled value year after year through avoidable mistakes.
The CA Final does not reward shortcuts. He gave it every hour his articleship allowed. He failed papers along the way, like most CA aspirants do, and he wrote them again. In 2018, when the result was announced, his name was on the pass list. The boy from Sirsa had become CA Neeraj Rohilla. The full timeline of that journey is summarised below.
| Milestone | Year | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| School in Sirsa, Haryana | 2008-2012 | Commerce stream at Vivekanand Bal Mandir Senior Secondary School |
| CA articleship in Delhi | 2014-2018 | Four years of audit training at V K Dhingra & Co., Chartered Accountants |
| Qualified as Chartered Accountant (ICAI) | 2018 | Cleared the CA Final, a result around 14% of candidates achieve each cycle |
| Co-founded KNAP Advisory Pvt Ltd | 2018 | Saket office; partnered with CA Kunal Mehta; parallel partnership at K N K & Company |
| Launched Startup Advisory brand | 2025 | Founder-focused arm of KNAP; 4.5/5 Google Reviews to date |
Look at that table again. Eleven years separate a small-town schoolboy from a Saket-headquartered firm with a 4.5 out of 5 Google rating. Nothing in that gap came free. Every hour was paid for.
Why Neeraj Rohilla turned toward startups
The awakening that founded Startup Advisory did not happen in a boardroom. It happened on dozens of audit floors, where Neeraj Rohilla watched the same heartbreaking pattern repeat itself. A first-time founder would walk in proud of a Rs 50 Lakh ($60K) seed round, only to discover that an LLP had been registered instead of a Pvt Ltd, ROC filings were two years overdue, ESOP pools were undocumented, and the entire investor due diligence was about to collapse. The product was strong. The dream was real. The paperwork was a graveyard.
Rohilla saw it again. And again. And again. Some founders had been duped by agent-style filing platforms that took their fees and disappeared. Some had relied on relatives who meant well but did not understand the Companies Act, 2013. Many had simply prioritised product over compliance because no one had told them, in plain language, what they were risking. Every story chipped away at him.
“Every great company starts with a dream, but sustainable growth requires the right support system. Our goal is to become that trusted partner for founders throughout their entrepreneurial journey,” says Rohilla, as detailed on his LinkedIn profile.
That sentence is the founding charter of Startup Advisory. In 2018, Rohilla and CA Kunal Mehta launched KNAP Advisory Pvt Ltd as their main vehicle. By 2025, after seven years of hands-on work, they crystallised a separate brand, Startup Advisory, dedicated only to first-time founders, D2C entrepreneurs, SaaS builders, manufacturing MSMEs, and NRI clients setting up Indian operations. The promise was specific: a CA, not just an agent, would review every filing. The fee would be flat and quoted upfront. A named human being would pick up the phone. It sounds small. For a first-time founder, it changes everything.
How Startup Advisory serves founders today
Startup Advisory operates as a CA-led firm headquartered at LGF, Building 2, Lane 1, Westend Marg, Saket, New Delhi 110030, with the working motto “We Care, We Deliver, We Honor”. The team registers a Private Limited Company in 5 to 7 working days once documents are ready. It handles Startup India / DPIIT recognition, GST registration, Import Export Code (IEC), MSME / Udyam Aadhaar, and Section 8 incorporation. Once a company is running, the firm takes over the parts most founders find painful: cloud-based bookkeeping on Zoho, QuickBooks, or Tally Prime, Tax Deducted at Source (TDS) filings, GST returns, Income Tax Return (ITR) advisory, and ROC compliance.
The Virtual CFO function is where the firm’s positioning becomes sharpest. A full-time CFO in India typically costs Rs 18 Lakh to Rs 25 Lakh per year, which is impossible for almost every bootstrapped startup. Startup Advisory offers three tiers: Essentials at Rs 10,000 ($120) per month, Growth at Rs 25,000 ($300) per month, and Fundraise & Scale at Rs 45,000 ($540) per month. Each plan gives founders investor-grade Management Information System (MIS), forecasting, cash-flow control, and pitch-ready documentation. The pricing is deliberate. It is the smallest amount at which a real CA can still afford to genuinely review the work.
| Firm | FY24 India Revenue | Primary Focus |
|---|---|---|
| EY India | Rs 13,400 Cr (+16-17% YoY) | Government, mid-market, Global Capability Centres |
| Deloitte India | Rs 10,000 Cr (+29% YoY) | Consulting, audit, Fortune 500 clients |
| PwC India | Rs 9,200 Cr (+22% YoY) | Large enterprise advisory, ESG |
| KPMG India | Rs 5,900-6,200 Cr (+5.5-10% YoY) | Audit, risk advisory |
| Startup Advisory (KNAP brand) | Founder fees from Rs 10K/month | First-time founders, MSMEs, NRIs, D2C, SaaS |
The Big Four (Deloitte, PwC, EY, KPMG) Indian arms combined for around Rs 38,800 Cr ($4.67 Bn) in FY24 revenue, according to industry estimates verified by Business Standard. Their clients are Fortune 500 corporations and Global Capability Centres. They are excellent at what they do. They are also, structurally, not built for a 25-year-old founder running a Rs 1 Cr Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) brand out of a rented Noida warehouse. That gap is exactly where Startup Advisory lives. The firm picks up the phone for the founder no one else picks up the phone for.
What is the 50-year vision driving Neeraj Rohilla
Neeraj Rohilla’s lifetime vision is to build an Indian-origin professional services firm that earns a place beside the global Big Four, regardless of whether the journey takes 15 years, 50 years, or his entire career. He has stated this publicly. He has staked his reputation on it. He has also been honest about the timeline: this is not a five-year sprint. This is a generational build.
The scale of the ambition is worth pausing on. The Big Four collectively generated over $220 Bn (Rs 18.3 Lakh Cr) globally in 2025 and employed more than 1.5 million people. No Indian-origin firm has ever crossed that threshold. Not one. The country that produces the world’s CFOs, the country whose Chartered Accountants audit a meaningful share of the Fortune 500’s offshore operations, has somehow never built a domestic firm of equivalent stature. Rohilla wants to be part of changing that. His tools are unremarkable: clean books, on-time filings, flat fees, CA-reviewed work. His belief is that compounded honesty, applied over decades to founders who eventually become the country’s largest companies, will deliver what no marketing campaign ever could.
For Indian founders reading his journey, his story offers five quiet lessons worth tattooing on a workspace wall. First, the foundation matters more than the funding. A wrong entity choice in year one will cost Rs 1 Lakh to Rs 5 Lakh of cleanup later, and that is the cheap version. Second, pick co-founders for complementary skill, not just shared history. Rohilla focuses on registrations and compliance delivery; Kunal Mehta leads tax advisory and Virtual CFO engagements. The split is mechanical, deliberate, and durable. Third, compound dignity, not just revenue. A founder who treats the smallest filing with respect builds a reputation that outlasts every funding cycle. Fourth, think in decades, not quarters. Most founders plan an 18-month runway; Rohilla plans a 50-year arc. The first kind builds companies; the second kind builds institutions. Fifth, serve the people who cannot yet pay you back. A Rs 10,000 per month Virtual CFO retainer will not make anyone rich. It will, however, save founders who, ten years later, may become the country’s most quoted entrepreneurs. That is how trust gets built, one undervalued client at a time.
What’s Next
Startup Advisory’s stated 12-month roadmap focuses on three milestones: deeper Virtual CFO penetration among DPIIT-recognised startups, structured NRI advisory for India-bound founders, and a content-led calculator suite (Income Tax, GST, HRA, capital gains, EMI) already live on the firm’s site. The bigger question Rohilla is racing against is whether a Saket-based CA practice can scale to 1,000 active retainer clients by 2028 without diluting its CA-reviewed model. If you are a founder reading this, what would it cost you to wait another year before fixing your foundation?
Frequently Asked Questions
Last updated: June 23, 2026 at 15:10 IST
Written by Soumya Verma. Published: June 23, 2026. Updated: June 23, 2026. Have a tip? Write to us at editorial@startupfeed.in.
