TaxiForSure co-founder Raghunandan G’s newest startup Zolve has raised close to $15 million in a seed funding round led by Accel and Lightspeed.
The round also saw participation from Blume Ventures and prominent angel investors, including Ashish Gupta, former managing director at Helion, Greg Kidd, angel investor in Twitter and Ripple, Kunal Shah, founder of Cred, Rahul Mehta, managing partner at DST Global and Rahul Kishore, senior managing director at Coatue Capital.
Founder Collective, which had invested in Uber earlier, also participated in this round.
Two-month-old Zolve is a global neo-banking startup which looks to provide banking and financial services to individuals looking at migrating to international geographies.
According to the founder, individuals migrating to international geographies, including the US, find it difficult to access banking and credit services at competitive rates, owing to the lack of existing credit history in new geographies. It often takes 3-4 years for these immigrants to build a credible credit history in new geographies.
Headquartered in Delaware, US, and operations based out of Bengaluru, Zolve partners with banks and financial institutions to help these individuals get access to services, based on their financial history in home countries, equipping them with bank accounts, along with debit and credit cards. It plans to launch its platform around mid- year.
“There is an arbitrage for customers today because international banking systems don’t interact with each other. This causes migrating populations to suffer, in spite of having a credible financial history in home markets. Through alternate data sources and our underwriting, we aim to help these customers get access to banking and financial services at competitive rates in their new migrant geographies,” Raghunandan G, founder, Zolve in an interaction.
Raghunandan said Zolve will act as a technology layer on top banks and financial institutions, on-boarding customers directly, while providing products through partnerships.
“The global citizen community is largely underserved in terms of access to financial services and we believe that there is a huge market opportunity for Zolve,” said Anand Daniel, partner, Accel.
The company plans to be a full-stack financial services provider and also look to offer customers services including – remittances, cryptocurrency, loyalty-based solutions, insurance and credit through partnerships.
“Individuals with financial identities in multiple geographies need seamless global financial solutions and we believe the team’s strong identification with the problem will enable them to deliver compelling and innovative financial experiences,” said Bejul Somaia, partner at Lightspeed India Partners.
Zolve has already partnered with five Indian and American banks as well as card processing giant Visa to power its company-branded consumer credit and debit cards.
At present, the company focuses on students and professionals looking to migrate to the US. It is working with relocation agencies, immigration consultants to help identify customers and cross-sell its products.
Raghunandan G.’s previous startup TaxiForSure was sold to Ola Cabs in 2015 for $200 million. Post the exit, Raghunandan has been an angel investor in more than 40 startups including Vedantu, Bounce, Ninjacart among others.
