Mumbai : Kodo announced today that it has raised US$8.75 Mn in seed capital from a slew of investors that include Brex, Goat Capital, Pioneer Fund and other Silicon Valley investors. Kodo was part of the winter 2021 batch of Y-Combinator. It was launched in 2019 with the mission of putting a Kodo corporate card in the hands of every founder in India. It will use the funds raised to strengthen and expand its team across engineering, product, sales, credit and operations, to support its accelerated growth plans.
Business collections and spends in India are witnessing a massive shift from cash to digital, creating a strong tailwind for Kodo’s cards and spend management tools. Card spends on Kodo have grown 45% month on month for the last 12 months, leading to 83X jump in transaction volumes.
“Kodo has built an amazing foundation in India and we are looking forward to putting the full weight of our experience behind them,” said Henrique Dubugras, Brex Co-CEO. “We were immediately impressed with Deepti and her team’s deep understanding of the future of finance and are incredibly excited about the next phase of their business.”
Commenting on the investment, Deepti Sanghi, Co-Founder & CEO, Kodo said, “We are obsessed about creating the most intuitive and seamless financial products for founders that enable them to free up their time and mind to pursue their own mission with confidence. 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.”
“As early investors of the global fintech revolution, we were struck by the clarity of Kodo’s vision,” said Robin Chan, General Partner of Goat Capital. “We seek tenacious founders unlocking massive new markets. Deepti and Gaurav are exactly the type of founders we love backing.”
Brex is all-in-one finance for growing businesses. Brex helps companies spend, save, and earn smarter—and take every dollar further—by doing more than a bank, bookkeeper, credit card or expense software could ever do alone. After completing the Y Combinator accelerator program in 2017, Brex has grown to over 600 employees and raised over US$940 million in venture capital.
Goat Capital was founded in 2020 by Justin Kan (co-founder of Twitch) and Robin Chan with over $100M under management. Justin and Robin have invested at the earliest stages in companies such as Gingko Bioworks, Ramp Financial, Razorpay, Scale.ai, Square, Twitter, Uber, Xendit, and Xiaomi.
Kodo offers a frictionless card experience to busy founders, starting with a 3-minute approval process to automated expense management tools. The Company believes repetitive financial tasks should be automated so that founders can focus on building their business and doing what they love. Kodo also offer rewards worth over INR 50 Lakhs to its customers.
Deepti Sanghi, co-founder and CEO of Kodo, realized the need to build a credit card for start-ups when she struggled to get a business credit card for the earlier version of this start-up. She teamed up with Gaurav Thapa (co-founder and CTO) who had faced the same challenge at his previous start-ups. Prior to Kodo, Deepti was heading bank partnerships for MoneyTap (a Sequoia backed start-up) where she helped launch and scale up the company’s credit card and credit line products.
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. Kodo recently launched Kodo Pay, which allows customers to now use their Kodo credit limits to pay even those vendors who don’t accept cards.
For more information, visit: www.kodo.in
