Spense, a fintech startup based out of Bengaluru, has raised $1.85 million as a pre-seed funding round, led by GrowthCap Ventures and participated in by a number of well-known angel investors that include Kunal Shah (Founder of CRED), Sayandeb Banerjee (Co-founder of The Math Company), Suresh Rayasam (Head of Applied AI for GTM) and Ravi Sudhakar (Director of AI Global Business Strategy for Microsoft).
Spense is developing a modern banking infrastructure that enables financial institutions to launch and run products like secured credit cards, prepaid cards, and Forex programs. The startup has created a suite of programmable banking tools that are capable of integrating easily into the existing systems used by banks and other financial players. These banking tools help to streamline the speed, security, and transparency of launching credit-based services.
Spense is co-founded by Pawan Kumar, the erstwhile Head of Applied Science at Uber India and Srinivas Krishnamurthy, former Technical Lead with BNP Paribas, who aims to solve a widespread challenge in the fintech space, enabling traditional financial institutions to add new credit products and offerings without forcing a go to market change to their legacy systems. The founders bring a wealth of technical and industry experience that has helped shape the vision and direction of the company’s product.
With the new funding, Spense plans to bring on more banks, improve partnerships with fintechs, and grow its technology stack to support additional financial products. The startup seeks to diversify its current offering of credit cards to include issues in other use cases in lending and payments. By providing a scalable and secure platform, Spense advances financial institutions’ efforts to expedite time-to-market, improve regulatory compliance, and properly audit their services.
Spense’s platform is pragmatic because it integrates easily with legacy systems and helps address complicated regulatory requirements, making it an appealing solution for banks and fintech firms wanting to move quickly and with compliance in mind.
Spense’s funding round calls attention to the growing interest in fintech infrastructure startups that facilitate new products and services by providing backward compatibility into traditional banking and forward compatibility into 21st-century digital finance. As more financial institutions are seeking adaptable/the most flexible and scalable solutions, Spense is in a strong position to play a leading role in the evolution of modern banking infrastructure.
As India experiences rapid fintech sector growth, Spense’s offering comes as a relevant offering, and at the right moment, to serve the many banks and financial players who need to revamp their offerings in an incredibly dynamic digital environment.
