FPL Tech Raises $10 Mn Funding From Sequoia, Matrix & Others

Pune-based fintech startup First Principle Labs (FPL) Technologies, on August 18, announced that it has raised $10 Mn in funding from Sequoia India, Matrix Partners India and Hummingbird Ventures. The company, in a press statement, said that it will be utilising the fund to further scale up its engineering and product development teams and customer acquisition. With this latest funding round, the company clocked total funding of $15 Mn till date.  

Prior to this, in September 2020, the company had raised $4.5 Mn in funding from Sequoia India and Matrix partners among other angel investors. At the time, the company had plans to launch consumer credit cards through bank partnerships. 

Today, along with the funding announcement, the company also has announced the launch of its mobile-first metal credit card called ‘OneCard,’ which would be available across 12 cities, including Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Bengaluru, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Surat, Vadodara, Indore, Jaipur and Kolkata. The company said that it plans to expand into other geographies in the coming months.  

With this, users can now apply for a credit card via the OneScore app (free credit rating and credit scoring platform), which is currently available on both Android and iOS platforms. 

OneScore, which was launched in July 2019, in the span of one year has acquired close to 2 Mn users. In December 2019, the company had tied-up with global fintech giant Visa to launch this product, which claims to offer contactless transaction experience for users. 

At the time, FPL had said that it would provide its customers with a mobile application to manage aspects of their credit life cycle. Also, the digital credit card is said to leverage Visa’s technology and global acceptance footprint to make it available for a wide range of use cases. 

Founded in 2018, FPL Technologies was founded by Anurag Sinha, Rupesh Kumar and Vibhav Hathi in September 2018. With the launch of ‘OneCard,’ FPL Tech aims to disrupt the market by making agents or sales marketing professionals redundant in the process. 

Offers Seamless Experience, Control & Reward Programme 

Focusing on providing a seamless experience for the digital-savvy young audience, FPL competes with the likes of other fintech startups, including Cred, Orangepay, Copenhagen Fintech, Verifi and Netpay among others. According to Research and Markets, the credit card user base in India is expected to reach 47 Mn in 2020, growing at a CAGR of more than 25% during 2020-2025. The growth of the market is said to be fuelled by the millennials who typically purchase products first and pay later.   

FPL said that its cardmembers can control every aspect of their OneCard from a mobile app, be it domestic or international transactions, deactivating their card, enabling online/offline transactions, paying their credit card bill and more. Further, it said that there are no annual or joining fees and forex markup rate of 1% is among the lowest in the market. 

In addition to this, FPL’s OneCard also offers a reward programme ‘OneRewards,’ where it claims to award 5x points on the top two spend categories each month. Accordingly, the points would be credited and redeemed on the OneCard mobile app, with no redemption fee. Further, the company said that with the issue of fractional points, no spend ever goes unrewarded.