SaaS startup Finarkein announces raising $4.75 mn in pre-series A round

Company's technology allows enterprises to co-create data products on India's digital public infrastructure

Finarkein has raised $4.75 million in a pre-series A round led by Nexus Venture Partners, said the business-to-business software as a service company on Tuesday.

The round also saw participation from existing investors IIFL’s Fintech Fund and Eximius Ventures, and angels like Uni’s Nitin Gupta and Ashika Group’s Chirag Jain.

Finarkein’s data and workflow orchestration platform allows enterprises to co-create data products on India’s digital public infrastructure (DPI) like the account aggregator (AA) ecosystem and Open Network for Digital Commerce’s (ONDC) financial services.

Finarkein said that its platform has in the last 18 months emerged as the leading enabler for more than 50 enterprises to publish and consume data on DPIs.

“India’s approach to digital infrastructure has been unique wherein a lot of value is directly passed onto end consumers. DPIs like the account aggregator are only accelerating this, and at Finarkein we’re glad to be a part of this movement from day zero and scale it further,” said Nikhil Kurhe, co-founder and chief executive officer of Finarkein.

Anand Datta, partner at Nexus Venture Partners, said: “At Nexus, we partner with extraordinary entrepreneurs to build category defining companies, and in Finarkein, we see just that, India’s first and leading data and DPI infra company.”

India needs the financial services sector to “grow multifold” and help it become a $7 trillion economy by 2030, said Finarkein. DPIs like the account aggregator ecosystem, Unified Payments Interface and ONDC will make financial services cheaper while helping innovation and distribution.

Finarkein was conceptualised in 2019 in response to the Reserve Bank of India’s master circular outlining the account aggregator framework and how it would democratise access to financial data for regulated entities. More than 40 million Indians have used Finarkein’s embedded data products to securely grant consent and share data via licensed non-banking financial companies AAs.