Indiastack members Sahil Kini and Nikhil Kumar float fintech platform; raise $3.5 Mn seed fund

Indiastack members Sahil Kini and Nikhil Kumar have floated a fintech platform called Setu and raised seed fund of $3.5 million led by Lightspeed with participation of Bharat Innovation Fund.

Two months ago, Entrackr had reached out to Kini and Kumar to get the details of their latest gig, however, they had denied to comment on it.

Kini and Kumar's LinkedIn profile reflects that they have been working for Setu since August 2018.

According to RoC filing with MCA, the company will be based out of Bengaluru and is owned and operated by Brokentusk Technologies Pvt ltd.

Further, the company has issued  2,399 Series A CCPS @ Rs 87,712.5 to Lightspeed and 399 shares to Bharat Inclusive Technologies Seed Holding at the same price.

Lightspeed invested around Rs 21.04 crore whereas Bharat Inclusive put in the rest capital. Brokentusk Technologies also issued 1 equity share to both the investors.

For the uninitiated, Setu builds low-cost, modular API infrastructure across four categories - bills, savings, credit, and payments. Any developer can access Setu's sandbox to build an application, and go through a rigorous developer certification program to go live.

This will save them time and costs while providing the opportunity to integrate with one financial institution to test their product. The company has started work with Kotak, SBI Mutual Fund to offer this service.

An ET report revealed that Setu recently introduced a product called Collect. This flagship product can allow merchants of every size to collect recurring payments from consumers such as EMIs for loans, mutual fund SIPs, insurance premiums or housing society maintenance charges.

Kumar also said that Setu will organise community events like Hackathons to attract developers and will connect to major players through strategic partnership.

The serial entrepreneurs Kini and Kumar have been the members of Indiastack for more than three years. It's a privately-owned bouquet of proprietary software applications powering most Aadhaar applications and Digital India initiative.

Earlier Kumar was the co-founder of Voyce-a customer feedback system for SMBs that was later acquired by Exotel whereas Kini had founded Magnet Works that used to build both hardware and software for the Industrial Internet.