Daily gold savings app Jar has raised $32 million in a Series A round led by Tiger Global and participated by Rocketship.vc, Third Prime, Stonks, Force Ventures and existing investors including Arkam Ventures and WEH.
Several angels include Klarna founder Victor Jacobsson, Suleman Ali of Ali Capital, Shamir Karkal, founder of Sila Money, Byron Ling of Cannan Partners, Joel John of Ledger Prime and Italic founder Jeremy Cai also joined the round.
The Series A round follows a $4.5 million Seed funding in August. While the company didn’t divulge its latest valuation, according to Entrackr’s sources – Jar has been valued at a little over $200 million.
Besides expansion and acquiring customers, Jar will deploy proceeds to launch lending and insurance verticals, it said in a press release.
Founded by Nishchay AG and Misbah Ashraf, Jar allows users to start investing from as low as Re 1 and invests that money in digital gold. The app can also detect expenses from a user’s SMS folder and round it off to the nearest 10 to generate a spare change for each of their expenses.
Users’ investments in digital gold are backed by physical gold of the same amount and they can choose to withdraw that much gold or liquidate at any time. Jar claims over 4 million users, most of whom are making any kind of investment for the first time in their lives.
The Bengaluru-based company has partnered with digital gold platform SafeGold and earns a commission from users’ investments.
Jar is quite similar to Acorns and Stash in the US and doesn’t have any direct competitors in India as of now. However, the company’s entry into lending will put it in the league of gold centric lending apps such as Indiagold and Rupeek. Bengaluru-based Rupeek had recently closed a $34 million round led by Lightbox whereas Indiagold, led by former Paytm executives Deepak Abbot and Nitin Misra, also closed $12 million Series A round in August.
