● Serial entrepreneurs Vineet Saxena, Ajay
Pandey, and Kush Srivastava established
CARD91 in Aug 2020. They have previously founded successful companies including
Myntra, Mastiff, Quiklo
● The funding round was led by Infinity
Ventures, Point72 Ventures, and Sabre Partners. Emphasis Ventures (EMVC),
Commerce Ventures and high-profile Fintech Angel Investors also participated
● CARD91 has previously raised seed funding
from EMVC, Rainmatter Capital, Blume Founders Fund, Inflection Point Ventures,
and marquee angel investors across the Indian tech ecosystem
India: CARD91, a global Payment Issuance
Infrastructure platform that powers B2B payments and lending on a card, has
emerged out of stealth mode and today announced USD 13 million in a Pre-Series
A funding round. The company is founded by Vineet Saxena, Ajay Pandey, and Kush
Srivastava – all repeat entrepreneurs from the commerce and payments industry who
have previously founded successful technology ventures including Myntra
(acquired by Flipkart), Mastiff and Quiklo. While in stealth mode, the founding
team earlier partnered with top seed fintech investors led by US-India fund
Emphasis Ventures (EMVC) and prominent CEOs across the Indian technology
sector. The company is building a plug-and-play Payment Issuance Infrastructure
that helps businesses and banks launch co-branded cards and simplify business
payments. Globally, the payments industry is a trillion-dollar opportunity and
is further poised for tremendous growth, with players like CARD91 entering the
market.
The recent funding round was led by Infinity
Ventures, Point72 Ventures, Sabre Partners, EMVC, and Commerce Ventures along
with marquee angel investors. In addition to expanding its reach across India
and internationally, the newly raised funds will allow the brand to bolster its
service offering and acquire new talent.
With CARD91, businesses can gain control over
their payment flows managing the entire payment lifecycle, from onboarding to
transaction processing to data reconciliation. For banks, its flexible API
platform provides their customers with infrastructure to enable new age payment
services and card-based lending.
The
founders at CARD91 said, “Digitization across industries has
accelerated over the past two years, and payments is no exception. We believe
the next 100 million users in India will be accessing credit via cards issued
by brands and businesses. Launching card programs is a difficult process since
it involves integrating with multiple players. Our goal is to simplify this
process for businesses by providing a plug-and-play solution.”
They
further added, “Globally a lot of businesses want to provide embedded finance
as a service, which has increased the demand for such payment infrastructure
players and seen a massive interest from investor communities. We are excited
to capture a fair share of this massive market opportunity that the payment
industry represents globally. Having marquee fintech investors back us,
strengthens our belief in our product.”
“CARD91 has created a payments
infrastructure that simplifies the card issuance process for start-ups,
businesses and banks alike,” said Jeremy Jonker, Co-Founder and Managing
Partner at Infinity Ventures. “We’re excited about investing in the vision
of the founding team and believe that their international expansion will enable
their customers to succeed in a global economy.”
“CARD91
has a unique opportunity to power new and needed consumer and business payment
products and cards in the region where more mature alternative funding sources,
digital wallets and new payment rails are not yet as prevalent as in other
parts of the world,” said Dave Matter, Advisor for Point72 Ventures, and its
portfolio companies. “This positions them to become a trailblazer for truly
innovative payments products globally.”
Rajiv
Maliwal, Managing Partner of Sabre Partners said “We are very excited to back CARD91 as
we are seeing that the entire complex value chain of payments is up for
disruption. The transformative potentialities of modern card issuing are
immense as businesses and customers are demanding new experiences. We have
strong belief in the exemplary founding team of CARD91 to realize that vision
for the Company.”
Headquartered in Bengaluru with offices in
Mumbai and Delhi, CARD91 is poised to become a prominent player in the global
payment infrastructure market serving businesses across industries.
For more information, please visit https://www.card91.io/
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