Spense, a Bengaluru-based fintech startup, has raised $1.85 million in a pre-seed funding round led by GrowthCap Ventures.
The round also saw participation from marquee angels including Kunal Shah (Founder, CRED), Sayandeb Banerjee (Co-founder, The Math Company), Suresh Rayasam (Head of Applied AI for GTM), and Ravi Sudhakar (Director, AI Global Business Strategy, Microsoft), among others.
The fresh capital will be used to onboard more banks, expand fintech partnerships, and broaden Spense’s product and technology stack, enabling new financial use cases beyond secured credit cards.
Founded in 2022 by Pawan Kumar and Srinivas Krishnamurthy, Spense provides infrastructure for secured credit cards, prepaid cards, and forex programs.
The company offers APIs, developer tools and infrastructure for secured credit cards, prepaid cards, and forex programs, tailored for regulated entities looking to launch digital credit products with speed, compliance, and reliability.
Spense plans to expand its infrastructure capabilities to support banking and financial service providers targeting the next 100 million users in the country.
The startup also seeks to diversify its current offering of credit cards to include issues in other use cases in lending and payments.
Pawan Kumar, Co-founder & CEO, Spense, said, “If someone has a fixed deposit, they should be able to get a credit card. It’s that simple. We’ve proven the model. Now it’s time to scale secured credit cards with every bank in India. Our job is to make banking work quietly in the background—so people can access what they need when they need it. We are here to help banks scale responsibly and FinTechs build faster—with confidence.”
Pratekk Agarwaal, General Partner at GrowthCap Ventures, said, “Spense is solving one of the most overlooked problems in Indian finance access. Millions are excluded not because they are unworthy of credit, but because the rails to reach them didn’t exist. What stood out to us was the team’s clarity, precision, and deep commitment to building a bank-grade 2.0 infrastructure that actually works at scale.”
