Paytm Money’s Former Chief Pravin Jadhav Unveils His New Fintech Venture, Bags Funding

Former Paytm Money CEO Pravin Jadhav’s new startup Raise Financial has raised a seed round from Mirae Asset Venture Investments, Blume Ventures’s Founders Fund and US-based early-stage fund Social Leverage, along with several unicorn founders and CEO joining the cap table.

CRED founder Kunal Shah, Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamoorthy, PhonePe founders Sameer Nigam and Rahul Chari, Udaan founders Amod Malviya and Sujeet Kumar, Freecharge cofounder Sandeep Tandon, Pine Labs CEO Amrish Rau, Jupiter Money founder Jitendra Gupta and Freshworks’ Gireesh Mathrubootham are some of the prominent people that have participated in this seed round.

Raise Financial is building a consumer-facing wealth management solution that will allow users to smartly manage their money, Jadhav told Inc42. The platform will be a one-stop solution for customers’ capital management needs, including digital payments, investments, financing and more. The product is due to be launched in the second half of 2021 and will focus largely on users from metros and Tier I cities. Raise will target the tax paying demographic in these top-tier cities with an annual income of INR 5 Lakhs and above.

The company will charge commission and transactional cost for each service it offers. “Every model that we are going to get into, there is going to be a payment model which will be subjected to the kind of the service that we provide,” Pravin Jadhav explained. Raise Financial would loosely model itself around San Francisco-based wealth management unicorn SoFi Money.

Jadhav further added, “I want to make a revenue-first product. I have seen companies where you scale up to a certain level and struggle with monetisation plans. So unlike some of those ideas, I want to make sure to build a revenue-first product where the first product or service we bring to the market, we want to monetise on that from day 0.”

The company plans to use this funding to set up a team of 100, technology and infrastructure to launch its first product in this calender year. It will also look into cracking partnerships with banking institutions in the upcoming months in order to facilitate the services.

Prior to leading Paytm Money’s team, Jadhav has been associated with Servify, FreeCharge, Ohana Media, Rediff.com. He had also founded social network platform Wishberg, which shut down in 2014.

According to InvestIndia, the Indian fintech segment is poised to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.2% between 2017 to 2021 to reach $92 Bn. The sector has been divided into four segments, namely wealthtech, payments, lending and Insuretech. Raise Financial aims to get into all the segments with its one-stop money management solution.

As per Inc42+ estimates, Indian fintech startups raised $2.1 Bn across 131 deals, making up for 18.2% of the capital that was invested in Indian startups in 2020.