Fintech startup Bright Money gets $31 million from Sequoia, others
The fintech startup was part of the first cohort of Surge, Sequoia India’s accelerator, and counts the likes of Naveen Tewari and Abhay Singhal of InMobi, Kunal Shah of Cred, Jitendra Gupta of Jupiter, and Ram Shriram of Alphabet Inc. as its angel backers.
The fresh capital will be used for hiring as well as building the product suite before launch.
Founded in 2019, Bright Money uses artificial intelligence to help users make better financial decisions. Its founding team almost exclusively comprises data scientists and AI engineers who worked together at InMobi. Avi Patchava, Varun Modi and Avinash Ramakanth worked at the adtech startup, as did senior data scientist Amit Bendale. Petko Plachkov, however, is a financial services veteran who was formerly with Mckinsey. Alex Seyfert was a consumer technology product leader at Amazon.com Inc.
“When we started building Bright in 2019, we set out to launch a unique system powered by data science to help our customers organise their finances and tackle their debt,” cofounder Avi Patchava said. “The Series A funding we have secured will allow us to take our platform to the next level, by providing users with a transformative journey with their money to really achieve their financial futures.”
At present, the Bengaluru- and San Francisco-based startup currently has 150 data scientists, engineers, and customer experience team members in Bengaluru, and is looking to double the team. While set for launch in the US first, Bright Money will soon be available to customers in India and Southeast Asia.
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“The future of financial services is personalised advice and products available in real-time and at scale,” Sequoia India Managing Partner Harshjit Sethi said. “Bright has meticulously built an intelligent product that provides every user with contextualized financial suggestions on debt and savings to improve their financial wellbeing.”
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