Open-finance platform ‘Fego.ai’ raises $1.5 million seed capital from
3one4 Capital, Saison Capital, Kunal Shah & others
India’s fintech veterans & angel investors who built CRED, BharatPe, Groww, M2P, etc., have also backed the company as part of this seed round
Fego.ai, one of the earliest open-finance players in India, offers a full-stack open-finance platform to help companies connect with users’ financial accounts and understand users’ financial behaviour to make finance engaging & actionable for all
Chennai, December 8, 2021: Open-finance platform Fego.ai today has announced raising $1.5 million seed capital from 3one4 Capital, Saison Capital, Eximius Ventures, First Cheque and Speciale Invest. India’s fintech veterans and prominent angel investors who also participated in the round include Kunal Shah (Founder, CRED), Suhail Sameer (CEO, BharatPe & Managing Partner, OTP Venture Partners), Shashvat Nakrani (Co-founder, BharatPe), Lalit Keshre (Founder, Groww), Madhusudhanan R & Prabhu Rangarajan (Co-Founders, M2P Fintech), Aprameya Radhakrishna (Founder, Koo) & Amit Goel (Medici).
The startup, which is one of the earliest open-finance players in India, plans to use the funds to strengthen and expand its developer offerings, build its team as well as augment the pace towards the public launch of its offerings. Fego, which provides “Lego” blocks for finance, offers an intelligent open-finance product stack for developers and companies to embed insightful financial experiences and personalise user engagement. Its APIs enable companies to build on top of Fego to connect users’ financial accounts, enrich customer experience and understand users’ financial behaviour across use-cases like lending, KYC, collections, wealth, etc., in a secure and trusted environment ensuring data privacy. Fego makes finance contextual, engaging and actionable for all, allowing users to have greater control over their finances, and equipping companies to go beyond transactional services to place themselves in their users’ day-to-day experiences.
Kumar Srivatsan S, the Co-Founder & CEO of Fego.ai, said, “With Fego, companies can reimagine finance by providing better experiences to their users, identify what drives their users’ financial behaviour and leverage these insights to be relevant in their users’ lives. We are building exciting rail-roads atop the Transactional Data Stack in a safe and trusted environment and are thrilled to have aligned investors with us on our journey.”
Speaking on the investment, Anurag Ramadasan, Partner, 3one4 Capital, said, “Open-finance is a pivotal moment in the industry, both Centralised Finance (CeFi) and Decentralised Finance (DeFi) alike. We think leveraging user information in an open and transparent manner will lead to a huge expansion of value generation in the fintech industry in the next decade. Kumar Srivatsan and Kumar Srikanthan have been ahead of the curve in determining the right problem statements in this space and building out solutions as the industry matures. We’re excited to support their vision of empowering millions of users with better financial services starting with India.”
Fego.ai competes with global open-finance startups such as Mx.com, Tink, Truelayer, Flinks, among others. Currently in private beta, the company is working with a closed cohort of clients, including fintech startups, incumbent financial institutions and consumer internet companies.
Chris Sirisereepaph, Partner, Saison Capital, one of the co-investors, added, “Demand for seamless user experiences and financial connectivity is rapidly increasing and Fego.ai fosters engagement and trust through personalised financial experiences and insights-based outcomes throughout various stages of users lives. Open-Banking will soon expand to the Web3 world as well, as DeFi and CeFi are data silos currently. With a strong team coming from both web3 and traditional fintech backgrounds, Fego is well positioned to also build the data bridge between both worlds”
Kumar Srikanthan S, Co-Founder, Fego.ai, noted, “Value is unlocked when financial data leads to actions with meaningful outcomes. By removing the complexities atop transaction data, Fego also taps into the account aggregator framework and makes it easy for developers to build on top of Fego and not only embed finance but also bring fintech applications faster to market.” Kumar Srikanthan and Kumar Srivatsan S are second-time fintech founders who previously co-founded OptaCredit, a digital lending platform for financial wellness products.
With a rising number of entities looking to deliver digital financial services as part of their user journeys (accelerated by the pandemic), open-finance adoption has been growing globally, ushering in a new wave of financial innovation and thereby reshaping finance for the world. The Fego.ai team also plans to expand across select geographies with strong open-banking frameworks and similar transaction data infrastructure. Fego.ai aims to become a truly horizontal open-finance player across Web2.0 and Web3.0, serving as a CeFi-DeFi bridge to solve various problems including over-collateralisation currently plaguing the DeFi landscape.
About Fego.ai:
An open-finance platform, Fego.ai empowers developers and user-facing entities to embed data-driven financial experiences for their users. Fego makes finance engaging and actionable by equipping companies with the “Lego” blocks for Finance, to go beyond transactional services and place themselves in their users’ day-to-day experiences, in a safe and trusted environment. For more information, visit fego.ai
About 3one4 Capital:
3one4 Capital is an early-stage venture capital fund based in Bangalore, India. The firm works in select market categories and in the intersection of adjacencies that are large, growing, and ready for unique products and services. The themes pursued are SaaS and Enterprise Automation, Direct-to-Consumer products and services, Digital Media, FinTech, and Deep Technology, with a focus on areas such as machine-driven actionable intelligence services for the enterprise, ambient intelligence technologies, edtech, logistics and distribution, consumer products and services, and health.
3one4’s investments are biased towards companies exploiting technology to create, grow, or dominate large markets in India. The fund also invests a portion of its capital in US-focused companies that have feedforward effects into the themes being pursued in India.
Through a deep involvement strategy, the fund works with founding teams and subject-matter experts to prioritize and strategize for product-market fit, and then optimize for defensibility and growth in revenue and impact. With a focus on margins and on delivering uncompromised end-user experiences, the fund aims to reduce risk, detect new growth opportunities, and return rewarding outcomes to all the stakeholders involved.
With its third early-stage fund and its fifth fund overall, the firm now manages a combined corpus of INR 2,300 Cr (USD 300 Mn) and a portfolio of over 70+ investments across the early stage.
Media inquiries:
Sri Kalyani Nippani | kalyani@verblyinc.com | +91 8095437541
Team Fego.ai | contact@fego.ai
