Grameen Financial Services Pvt. Ltd. (GFSPL) was born out of the need for timely and affordable credit to India's poor and low-income households. We drew inspiration from Give Us Credit, a book written by Alex Counts, President & CEO, Grameen Foundation USA. This book details the remarkable stories of Bangladesh's poor raising themselves out of poverty through the microfinance movement that was spearheaded by Nobel Laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus. The organization was founded in 1999 with the name Grameen Koota as a project under the T. Muniswamappa Trust, an NGO. Grameen Koota adapted the Grameen Bank's group lending methodology of microfinance to the Indian setting and was launched at Avalahalli, a village in Bangalore (Karnataka).

Grameen Koota steadily groomed a class of mature and financially literate women entrepreneurs, who began to outgrow the group lending model. Anticipating the increased credit requirements of their growing livelihoods, an individual lending program - Maarg - was begun in May 2008 as a pilot project.

The organization soon transformed from an NGO to a well-regulated and governed Non-Banking Financial Company (NBFC-MFI) under the name Grameen Financial Services Pvt. Ltd. and currently offers a wide variety of financial products and social development services.