Fintech startup Kiwi has raised $24 million (Rs 208 crore) in its Series B round led by Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India, with participation from existing backers Nexus Venture Partners, Stellaris Venture Partners, and Omidyar Network.
Entrackr had exclusively reported the development last week.
The proceeds will be used to accelerate Kiwi’s product roadmap, bolster unit economics, and drive customer acquisition.
Launched in 2022 by Siddharth Mehta, Mohit Bedi, and Anup Agrawal, Kiwi enables users to access RuPay credit cards on UPI, offering the flexibility of credit with UPI’s ubiquitous merchant acceptance.
Since inception, the startup claims to have issued over 2 lakh RuPay Credit Cards and currently facilitates more than 5 million monthly merchant transactions across 600 cities.
Kiwi has already partnered with YES Bank and AU Small Finance Bank, and is in talks to onboard two more large banking partners this fiscal.
The firm has set a target of issuing 1 million RuPay credit cards by 2027.
The funding comes at a time when fintech players like LazyPay, OneCard, Uni and Slice are ramping up efforts to expand credit access through UPI. India currently has over 350 million unique UPI users, which is nearly eight to ten times more than the number of credit card users. The acceptance network for credit on UPI is estimated to be 35 times larger than that of traditional credit cards.
According to startup data intelligence platform TheKredible, Siddharth Mehta, Anup Agarwal, and Mohit Bedi each hold about 16.2% stake in Kiwi as of the Series A round, while Nexus is the largest external stakeholder in the three-year-old startup. It will be interesting to see how much stake the founders dilute in the Series B round.
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