Y Combinator-backed Indian start-up closes another funding round

Karbon Card, a fintech offering corporate cards, has raised yet another funding of $15 million in a Series A led by Olive Tree Capital, Harmony and Avenir Growth Capital. Existing investors including Ramp, Mercury and Orios Venture Partners also participated in the current round. 

The latest round of funding comes close on the heels of the company raising a Pre-Series A round of $12 million in September last year. With the current round, the total funding raised by Karbon stands at around $32 million. 

The start-up, which counts Y Combinator as its early investor, will use the funds to ramp up product development, hiring and operations as it aims to become the country’s first corporate Neobank. 

Founded in 2019 by Pei-fu Hsieh, Amit Jangir, Kartik Jain and Sunil Sinha, Karbon is an expense management platform for small businesses, enterprises, corporates and start-ups. 

Karbon’s centralised platform helps businesses improve their efficiency and productivity in various aspects including small cash management, expense report automation, prepaid cards for business expenses, travel and expense management, employee flexible benefits, international travel cards and a digital marketing expense card.   

The latest funding comes at a time when there is growing interest in safety and demand for secured products and services.  

“We are extremely delighted to close our Series A because it means we now have the resources to build an even more compelling product and service to all our current and future customers.  We now have more than 2,000 companies as happy customers and are determined to grow this by many times this year,” said Co-founder Amit Jangir. 

The start-up closed 2021 with a monthly GTV (gross transaction value) of $30 million and expects to grow the GTV to $200 million per month in the current calendar year on the back of growing credit demand.   

The Bengaluru-headquartered venture offers start-ups four key benefits: credit of up to Rs 5 crore with no personal guarantee or fixed deposits, seamless payments transactions through corporate cards to its customers, customised rewards as per the start-up’s requirements and expense management through WhatsApp in a very intuitive way. 

The start-up makes money mostly off interchange fees and aims to solve a problem area for small businesses and start-ups by replacing the use of personal credit cards for company usage with corporate cards.

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