What It Costs to Borrow in Iran, Measured on One Listed Startup

Tapsi's finance costs came to 815 billion toman in the year to 20 March 2026, 3.43 times its entire operating profit, and swung Iran's only listed startup to its first loss since going public. The bill was not demand. It was debt, taken on after a capital increase stalled in regulatory review, and it is the only cost-of-capital number in Iran's technology sector that is audited and public.

Tapsi is the only Iranian startup that has ever listed on an exchange, and that single fact makes it the only Iranian technology company whose cost of raising money is audited, filed with a regulator, and public. Every other growth-stage company in the country negotiates its financing privately and never has to show the bill. Tapsi just did, in its consolidated financial statements for the year to 20 March 2026, and the bill is larger than the entire operating profit it was meant to fund.

Revenue grew 36 percent. The core ride-hailing and delivery business stayed profitable at the operating line. And the company posted a consolidated net loss of 549.5 billion toman anyway, its first since listing in September 2022. The gap between those two facts is not a demand story. It is a financing story, and it is now on the record in enough detail to measure.

The operating business held up

Start with what did not break. Tapsi’s revenue rose from 2,601.3 billion toman in the year to 20 March 2025 to 3,548.9 billion toman in the year to 20 March 2026, a 36.4 percent increase, and operating profit stayed positive at 237.3 billion toman. That is real compression from the year before, when operating profit was 608.5 billion toman on a 23.4 percent margin. But it is compression, not collapse: an operating margin of 6.7 percent on a business growing revenue at over a third a year is not what a demand problem looks like.

Most of that margin compression happened above the operating line, and it is only partly a cost story. Cost of goods sold, which the filing does not state directly but which is recoverable as revenue less gross profit, rose 83.2 percent against 36.4 percent revenue growth. Some of that is a genuine change in Tapsi’s cost structure: a mid-year ruling by Iran’s Audit Organization, settled only in late January or February 2026 after months of dispute, reclassified a large share of the incentive payments Tapsi makes to attract new drivers from a capitalized "transitional expenditure" to an ordinary expense, effective from 21 June 2025. By Tapsi’s own account that reclassification touched roughly half of what it pays drivers under the current incentive structure. Gross margin fell from 44.4 percent to 25.4 percent as a result.

Then the finance line arrived

Below the operating line sits the number that actually explains the year. Finance costs came in at 8,149,616 million rial, about 815.0 billion toman, roughly $4.58 million at the Tehran Index FY1404-filings rate of approximately 178,000 toman to the dollar. That is 5.8 times the prior year’s finance costs of roughly 140.5 billion toman, and it is 3.43 times the entire 237.3 billion toman of operating profit the company generated in the same twelve months. An operating business that held together got erased by a financing bill more than three times its size.

That is the number nobody else in Iran’s technology sector has had to publish. No investor on the Tehran Index registry discloses a fund size, we established that in Who Actually Funds Iranian Startups, and there is no public bond or credit index for Iranian growth-stage companies. Tapsi’s audited P&L is, purely as an artifact of being the one listed startup, the closest thing to an observable price of growth capital that exists anywhere in the ecosystem. It describes what one company paid, on one instrument mix we could not fully identify, not a market rate. Read it as a data point, not a benchmark.

Why the bill got this big

Tapsi asked for permission to raise equity. In October 2024, coming off a strong 2024-25, the company filed a capital increase request with Iran’s securities regulator, aimed at funding market-share expansion in its existing businesses and investment in new services. According to Boursepress’s reporting on Tapsi’s own audited statements, the request stalled because the regulator had not settled how capital expenditure should be reported, the same classification dispute that would later hit the incentive-cost line. Unable to raise the equity it had asked for, and still committed to its growth plan, Tapsi turned to what the same report calls "alternative financing methods." Finance costs are the line item where that shows up.

Tapsi’s chief executive, Seyed Mostafa Seyed Hosseini, said as much directly. At a shareholder question-and-answer session reported by Digiato on 8 December 2025, discussing an interim net loss figure for the year, he stated plainly that the loss was not related to the stalled incentive-capitalization question and was instead the result of financing through credit facilities and the absence of the capital increase. Two different disputes, both rooted in the same regulatory classification fight, landed on two different lines of the same income statement: one on cost of goods sold, from June 2025 forward, and one on finance costs, for the length of time equity stayed unavailable.

The same classification fight had a third, more visible consequence. Tapsi’s own shares were suspended from trading on Iran Fara Bourse from 7 July 2025, officially pending "review of the issuer’s disclosure status." The suspension was extended twice, and by late September 2025, Digiato reported it had run more than 80 days with no public explanation and no unaudited first-quarter statements filed, alongside a formal regulatory notice giving Tapsi until 22 October 2025 to comply. The underlying accounting question was not settled until the Audit Organization and the Ministry of Economy ruled on it in late January or February 2026, roughly seven months after trading stopped. A company that could not get an equity raise approved also could not, for most of a quarter, trade the equity it already had.

The other side of the same constraint

This is the mirror image of the argument in Iran’s Exit Problem Is an Exchange Rate Problem. That piece measured what it costs an equity investor to convert value out of an Iranian technology company. This one measures what it costs an operating company to bring growth capital in, when the equity route is not available on any workable timeline. Different mechanism, same shape: Iran’s formal capital markets impose a cost or a delay at exactly the point where a company needs speed, and the workaround is expensive in cash and, in Tapsi’s case, expensive in seven months of being unable to trade at all.

The company itself is forecasting the other side of the cycle. Following the early-2026 ruling, Tapsi told shareholders it expects to return to profitability during 2026, on the basis that reliance on debt-based financing should fall once the equity route reopens. That is company guidance, not an audited result, and it is stated here as such.

What we do not know

We do not know the interest rate Tapsi is paying or the instrument mix behind the 815.0 billion toman finance-cost line: bank facilities, corporate bonds, or a combination, and on what terms. None of the sources read for this piece disclose it, and settling it would require the debt note inside the full annual report rather than the summary figures on Codal and in the financial press, which is queued as a follow-up rather than guessed at here. We do not know whether any part of that finance cost reflects a foreign-currency component. Every fact Tehran Index carries on Tapsi describes a domestic, rial-denominated business, and no source read here names an FX effect, but we have not read the note that would rule it out with certainty. We do not know the final terms or timing of the capital increase Tapsi is still pursuing, or the exact size of the raise now being proposed. And we do not know whether the 2026 return-to-profit forecast will hold; it is the company’s own guidance, issued before the year it describes.

What is evidenced is narrower and more useful: an operationally sound company, growing revenue at 36 percent, was pushed into a net loss by a financing bill 3.43 times its operating profit, in a year when its preferred financing route, equity, was closed to it by regulatory delay rather than by investor demand. That is what growth capital costs in Iran when the equity market will not move fast enough to use it.

Cite as: Tehran Index, “What It Costs to Borrow in Iran, Measured on One Listed Startup”, 11 August 2026. Financial figures from the Tehran Index company registry (Tapsi), sourced to Codal consolidated financial statements for the years to 20 March 2025 and 20 March 2026, re-queried 11 August 2026. Narrative sourced to Boursepress (17 June 2026) and Digiato (28 September 2025 and 8 December 2025), read in full. tehranindex.com