Y Combinator-Backed Corporate Card Provider Kodo Bags $8.75 Mn In Seed

Mumbai-based fintech startup Kodo, which offers corporate cards and spend management tools for startups, has raised $8.75 Mn in seed funding round to accelerate its growth plans by hiring across engineering, product, sales, credit and operations. Brex, Goat Capital, Pioneer Fund, Y Combinator and other Silicon Valley investors participated in the round.

Founded in 2016 by Deepti Sanghi and Gaurav Thapa, Kodo was a part of Y Combinator’s  Winter Batch of 2021 that was announced in March 2021. Overall 43 Indian startups had made it to the accelerator programme’s winter batch. The list included matrimony app Betterhalf.ai, which recently raised $3 Mn as a part of pre-Series A funding round from S2 Capital, Quiet Capital, CRED’s Kunal Shah and more. BimaPe, BusinessOnBot and Cashbook were also part of the accelerator programme.

Kodo offers corporate card and business-to-business (B2B) payments solutions to small, medium businesses (SMB) as well as startups. The company claims that it has a 3-minute approval process to automated expense management tools, which can also automate repetitive financial tasks. The company also offers rewards worth over INR 50 Lakhs to its customers.

Companies using Kodo cards can issue multiple cards, both virtual and physical, to their team members. This provides complete end-to-end control to the founders and finance teams by enabling them to seamlessly track all expenses in one place in real time. The company recently launched Kodo Pay, which allows customers to use Kodo credit limits to pay even those vendors who don’t accept cards. The company claims that the card spends on its platform has grown 45% month-on-month for the last 12 months, leading up to 83X jump in transaction volume.

“We believe that founders should be free from the anxiety of where their money is, how much is being spent, and how to optimize their cash flows. Kodo cards with integrated spend management tools is our first step towards that goal. We are seeing accelerating adoption of Kodo cards from businesses ranging from VC backed startups to SMBs, across sectors. With this capital raise, we are well-positioned to build on that momentum, strengthen our team and expand our customer base,” Kodo’s cofounder and CEO Sanghi said.

Kodo competes with Bengaluru-based fintech startup Karbon Card that raised $1.2 Mn in pre-Series A last week, from existing investors Orios Venture Partners and MyAsiaVC. Karbon Card had raised $2 Mn seed funding from CRED founder Kunal Shah, and Citrus Pay cofounders Amrish Rau and Jitendra Gupta.

The company was founded in 2019 by Pei-fu Hsieh and Amit Jangir. It offers corporate cards to Indian startups with funding of at least INR 25 Lakh. The company offers its services to more than 200 Indian startups that include CRED, MoEngage, Jumbotail, MyGate, Jupiter, and several others.

Update: 28th May, 12:50 am

An earlier version of the headline had specified the round-off figure of investment, the same has been updated to reflect the exact amount of funding raised in this round.