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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.
