The owner of Paytm’s financial services boutique, India’s most valuable startup, is trying to do something similar again.
Former Paytm Money CEO Pravin Jadhav announced his startup Raise Financial Services on February 25, India.
Under Jadav’s leadership, Paytm’s Money tools have attracted more than 6 million users. This time around, he said he will focus on serving different demographics.
Today, hundreds of millions of users in India do not have access to financial services. They don’t have credit cards, they don’t get loans from banks, they don’t have insurance, they haven’t invested in trusts or stocks.
Many large and start-up companies in India are now trying to reach these users by building underwriting technologies that can use alternative data to determine the creditworthiness of applicants. It’s a tough, capital-intensive business built on pillars of uncertainty, assumptions, and hope.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Jadav said Raise Financial Services is aimed at customers living in major metropolitan areas, Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities (that is, in and around urban areas). “These people want financial products and have literacy about what they have, but they don’t get the services they need to provide.”
Paytm founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma and Pravin Jadav (left). Jadhav retired from Paytm in 2020 (image credit: Paytm)
His new startup will offer products across financial services such as investment, lending, insurance, wealth and payments. “I think banking is a field of infrastructure, so I won’t touch that part,” he said.
“The goal is to provide a very good product that no one offers. The second is to focus on tech-led distribution, and the third is today’s customer service experience. The quality is bad across the market. We are trying to solve it, “he said. “Over time, we will strive to connect all of this together.”
Jadav also announced that he had raised a seed round. He didn’t disclose the amount, but revealed more than enough prominent investors. CRED founder Kunal Shah, Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy, Udaan co-founders Amod Malviya and Sujeet Kumar , PhonePe CEO and CTO Sameer Nigam and Rahul Chari, Pine Labs CEO and Citrus Pay Owner and CEO Amrish Rau, Freecharge founder Sandeep Tandon, Jupiter founder and CEO Jitendra Gupta, Freshworks founder and CEO Girish Mathrubootham, WazirX Founder and CEO Nischal Shetty, Clevertap SVP Kuldeep Dhankar, Servify Founder and CEO Sreevatsa Prabhakar, and Walnut Founder and CEO Amit Bhor is participating in the round.
Jadav himself has also invested, and the round was led by venture capitalist Mirae Asset Venture. Multi-Act Private Equity, Blume Ventures (via Founder’s Fund), and Social Leverage, a US-based early stage investor, are participating, making this the first investment for Social Leverage in India.
Ashish Dave, CEO of Mirae Asset Venture’s Indian business, told TechCrunch that he had known Jadav for some time, but he reached out to Clubhouse ( He said he had heard of Mr. Jadav at various sessions at Clubhouse.
Jadav said users can expect the startup’s first product to go live later this year (I understand TechCrunch will launch sooner. The services offered by Raise Financial Services are: It is expected to have some similarities to Marcus from SoFi and Goldman Sachs).