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Abound has secured $14 Mn in a seed funding round led by NEAR Foundation,along with participation from Circle Ventures and Times Internet
This is the first external investment since Abound’s incubation at Times Internet, the digital arm of The Times of India Group
Abound plans to use the fresh capital to boost its product offerings, technological infrastructure and workforce
Cross border financial solutions platform Abound has secured $14 Mn (around INR 120 Cr) in a seed funding round led by NEAR Foundation along with participation from Circle Ventures and Times Internet.
The startup plans to use the fresh capital to boost its product offerings, technological infrastructure and workforce. It also aims to expand its headcount in product and engineering.
This is the first external investment since Abound’s incubation at Times Internet, the digital arm of The Times of India Group.
Founded in 2020, Abound caters to the Indian community in the US, providing seamless money transfers, cashback, and rewards on everyday transactions. The startup claims to be a financial super app for the Indian diaspora in the United States.
“We selected NEAR as our blockchain foundation for its industry leading scalability, efficiency, and resilience, which enables us to deliver a seamless experience while maintaining the security and transparency our users deserve,” said Nishkaam Mehta, CEO of Abound.
Abound claims to have processed $150 Mn in remittances and facilitated $87 Mn in reward gross merchandise value (GMV).
It also claims to have witnessed a 50% revenue growth month-on-month (MoM), serving more than 5,00,000 users.
“We’re building a unified platform where our community can earn rewards, seamlessly send money home, and ultimately send, spend, save, invest, and borrow across borders—all in one app,” said Mehta.
NEAR ecosystem focuses on decentralised blockchain-based platforms for building decentralized applications. “Leveraging the scalable and performant NEAR blockchain enables truly borderless solutions and opens up new opportunities for Indian-American expats and their families,” said Illia Polosukhin, founder and CEO, cNEAR Foundation.
Cross Border Payment Solutions Ecosystem
As per a World Bank economist’s blog post, India was the topmost recipient of remittances in 2024 with an estimated inflow of $129 Bn and 14.3% share in total global remittances.
With expansion of Indian business and diaspora in different parts of the world, the country’s cross border payments ecosystem is also expanding. Identifying the opportunity in this space, existing fintech platforms are foraying into the cross border segment and new entrants are eyeing the space.
Last month, cross border fintech platform HiWiPay raised $2 Mn (around INR 17.4Cr) in a seed funding round led by Unicorn India Ventures to use the fresh funding to expand and improve trade remittance business and scale up operations in the education remittances sector.
Cross-border payment startup Skydo secured the licence from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to function as a Payment Aggregator-Cross Border (PA-CB) entity in February. The authorisation strengthens Skydo’s commitment to creating compliant, seamless, cost-effective payment solutions for Indian exporters, it said.
Prior to that, fintech startup Cashfree Payments has pilot launched cross border payments in partnership with Swiggy, Zepto, Nature’s Basket, Nykaa, Bookmyshow, Redbus and Vedantu in December last year.
