Jitendra Gupta is one of the few entrepreneurs in India to raise a seed round to the tune of $25 million for his fintech startup – Amica Financial Technologies. While Gupta has been busy building neo banking platform Jupiter which is slated to launch next year, he’s all set to launch a separate micro-lending app – Bullet Money.
Bullet Money is currently in closed beta and rolled out to a select number of users. According to three Entrackr sources, it’s a micro-lending app that would offer loans up to Rs 20,000. “The loan offered by Bullet Money can be spent through Unified Payments Interface or UPI ecosystem,” said one of the people who used the product on condition of anonymity.
“Apart from online purchases, the loan can also be used for offline purchases. However, the payments will be done through UPI-based QR codes.” Bullet Money would lend through third parties, primarily non-banking financial corporations or NBFCs.
Gupta also confirmed the development to Entrackr.
“The idea is to provide convenience to consumers for UPI transactions which would save them in cluttered bank statements. We thought that clubbing the offering with Jupiter would not achieve optimal customer experience and hence a separate offering made more sense,” said Gupta in a response to Entrackr queries.
Sources emphasised that Bullet Money will be launched in a few weeks from now. It’s worth noting that Gupta has been working on a neo banking platform called Jupiter since the beginning of 2020. “We are in the final leg of our integration with our partner bank. Jupiter offering on digital banking will go live within the next couple of months as we are in the last leg of product building,” added Gupta.
Entrackr couldn’t ascertain the details and status quo of the neo banking platform independently.
Amica Financial has raised $26 million from marquee backers such as Sequoia Capital, Matrix Partners, Tanglin Venture and 3One4 Capital. Over 10 notable angels including Amrish Rau, Anupam Mittal, Sriharsha Majety, Kunal Shah, Kunal Bahl, Sumer Juneja, Utsav Somani and Ashish Hemrajani had also invested in the firm.
According to Fintrackr’s estimate, the company has been valued in the range of Rs 720 crore in its seed round.
Bullet Money appears to be similar to Paytm Postpaid which has been offering microloan to users for the past two years. Unlike Navi and KreditBee, loans by the app can’t be transferred to users’ bank accounts. Loans from Bullet Money can only be used for purchases inside the UPI ecosystem.
