Fi, a Bengaluru-based neobank, has raised $50 million in its Series B funding round at a valuation of $315 million from B Capital Group, Falcon Edge and others.
This is in addition to an earlier interim round with existing investors Sequoia Capital and Ribbit Capital.
The latest round boosts the startup’s valuation seven times over its Series A valuation of $45 million in 2020.
Fi’s founders are ex-Googlers who pioneered GPay—Sujith Narayanan and Sumit Gwalani. Fi has built an app that is a savings-friendly product that aims to simplify finances for working professionals.
Over a million users had registered on Fi’s waitlist to open a savings account. The account is an instant, zero-balance savings account with a debit card issued by Federal Bank.
“We have observed that there is inertia towards saving among digital natives. They want to save but never actually get to take proactive steps towards saving. So, while designing the features for Fi, we have tried to keep the user at the centre and build tools that help them overcome this inertia,” said co-founder Gwalani.
“The $50 million helps us grow in multiple ways. Of course, one is scale. We will also focus on multiple different areas and will launch investment products for our customers,” he added.
Fi is also part of the account aggregator system launched by RBI and will soon be launching services for its customers to connect every single bank account to the Fi app, which will help them access the same insights that Fi today provides for its bank accounts, Gwalani said.
Fi’s core focus is providing its customers with better and actionable insights on their spending behaviour and helping them save money by innovative ways to nudge them towards savings.
“Our vision is to help demystify finances for the users and help normalize their savings. So, we introduced the concept of FIT rules, where we have built things that make savings a lot more fun for users. So, for example, every time Virat Kohli hits a four, you can save ₹50 aside; every time you shop at Amazon, save some money aside; and now we have rules which we launched recently where every time you shop using Instagram for a couple of hours, say after 9pm, you can save money aside,” said Gwalani.
Gwalani added that Fi created a ‘smart deposit’ product, which combines the best of fixed deposit and recurring deposit. “You can add money whenever you want to as small as one rupee to huge amounts of money. This has been so popular that more than 20% of our users are already using smart deposits,” he said.
Source: Mint