Bengaluru-based banking infrastructure startup Spense has raised $2.8 million in a Seed funding round led by Arkam Ventures, with participation from Razorpay Ventures, GrowthCap Ventures, and Atrium Ventures. The fresh capital will be used to expand the company’s banking partnerships, strengthen its technology platform, accelerate product development, grow its engineering and go-to-market teams, and launch Credit Line on UPI (CLOU).
Founded in 2022 by Pawan Kumar and Srinivas Krishnamurthy, Spense develops banking infrastructure that enables financial institutions to offer asset-backed credit cards and credit lines without replacing their existing technology systems. Its platform supports lending against assets such as fixed deposits, mutual funds, equities, bonds, invoices, and real estate.
The funding round also saw participation from several fintech and technology operators, including Kunal Shah (CRED), Madhusudhan E (KreditBee), Ravishankar (Active.ai), Suresh Rayasam Venkatasubbaih (LinkedIn), and Sayandeb Banerjee (The Math Company).
Spense currently partners with seven major banks across India and powers more than two lakh active cards, issuing over 40,000 cards every month. According to the company, revenue increased 256% year-on-year to ₹2.71 crore in FY25 from ₹76 lakh in the previous financial year. The startup also reported a net profit of ₹53.9 lakh, marking its first profitable year after two years of losses.
With this latest investment, Spense’s total disclosed equity funding has reached around $4 million. The company previously raised $350,000 in November 2022 from QED Innovation Labs, followed by $1.85 million in May 2025, led by GrowthCap Ventures.
Spense says its platform connects core banking, deposit, and card management systems in real time while using agentic AI to automate onboarding, servicing, collections, and customer support. The company believes this infrastructure can help financial institutions deliver secured credit more efficiently.
Commenting on the fundraise, Pawan Kumar, Co-founder and CEO of Spense, said, “India’s credit challenge is often viewed as a risk problem. We believe it is fundamentally an infrastructure problem. India does not have a shortage of assets. It has a shortage of infrastructure that can convert those assets into usable credit. If you have a valuable asset, you should have access to modern credit.”
Srinivas Krishnamurthy, Co-founder and CTO, added, “For decades, banks digitized accounts, payments and transactions. The next phase of banking is the digitization of collateral itself. When assets become programmable, credit becomes real-time. When AI becomes operationally reliable, banking becomes dramatically more scalable. Together, these shifts will redefine how financial institutions originate, operate and service credit.”
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