Spense funding activity made headlines on 1 July 2026, as the Bengaluru-based banking infrastructure startup closed a $2.8 million Seed round led by Arkam Ventures, as publicly reported on 2026-07-01. The round also drew participation from Razorpay Ventures, GrowthCap Ventures, and Atrium Ventures, alongside a clutch of prominent fintech and technology angel investors. Founded in 2022 by Pawan Kumar and Srinivas Krishnamurthy, Spense builds bank-native infrastructure that enables financial institutions to launch credit cards and credit lines backed by customer assets — without replacing their existing technology stack.
Quick Highlights
- Founders: Pawan Kumar (Co-founder & CEO) and Srinivas Krishnamurthy (Co-founder & CTO), established in 2022
- Lead Investor: Arkam Ventures
- Participating Investors: Razorpay Ventures, GrowthCap Ventures, Atrium Ventures, Kunal Shah (CRED), Madhusudhan E (KreditBee), Ravishankar (Active.ai), Suresh Rayasam Venkatasubbaih (LinkedIn), and Sayandeb Banerjee (The Math Company)
- Investor Background: Arkam Ventures is the lead; its portfolio includes Skyroot Aerospace, Jar, KreditBee, Wint Wealth, and SpotDraft. GrowthCap Ventures previously led Spense’s pre-seed round in May 2025, making this a follow-on investment reflecting continued conviction in the founding team.
- Headquarters: Bengaluru, Karnataka
- Announcement Date: 1 July 2026
Funding Breakdown
Use of Funds
As publicly reported, the fresh capital will be deployed across four priorities: deepening existing banking partnerships, accelerating product development, expanding the company’s engineering and go-to-market teams, and launching Credit Line on UPI (CLOU) — Spense’s next product aimed at enabling revolving, asset-backed credit access directly through India’s UPI ecosystem. The company also plans to further build out its AI-powered infrastructure and intelligence layer for secured credit.
Funding Timeline
Before this Seed round, Spense raised a pre-seed round of $1.85 million in May 2025, led by GrowthCap Ventures as the company’s first institutional backer. The current $2.8 million Seed round brings Spense’s total disclosed equity funding to approximately $4 million across multiple closes, as publicly reported.
Expansion Plans
Spense plans to use the new capital to deepen banking partnerships across India, grow its engineering and go-to-market headcount, and launch its Credit Line on UPI (CLOU) product — a secured lending infrastructure that enables banks to offer revolving credit lines backed by customer assets such as fixed deposits, mutual funds, insurance policies, and other financial holdings. The company’s long-term vision is for every valuable customer asset — from equities to business receivables — to be instantly convertible into reusable, rewarding credit products through its platform.
Significance
This Spense funding round arrives at a pivotal moment for India’s credit ecosystem, where rising delinquencies in unsecured lending have prompted banks to tighten risk appetite and seek infrastructure-driven alternatives. Spense’s bank-native platform already powers over two lakh active cards and issues upwards of 40,000 cards every month — representing nearly 8% of India’s monthly credit card issuance — signalling meaningful traction for a company still at the seed stage. The startup also turned net profitable in FY25 while growing revenue 256% year-on-year to ₹2.71 crore, an unusual combination for an early-stage fintech. By positioning asset-backed credit as an infrastructure problem rather than a risk problem, Spense targets a structural gap that could support financial inclusion for millions of first-time borrowers who hold assets but lack access to formal credit.
These details have been verified against multiple publicly available reports as of 2026-07-01.
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Disclaimer: This report is compiled from publicly available sources and is for informational purposes only; funding figures are as publicly reported and may be subject to change.
