Google Pay Co-Founders Start Own Banking Startup In India, Raises $13M In Funding

From proving a mobile payments app to India with Tez, Sujith Narayanan is transitioning to a different arena of finance with his new company epiFi.

Narayanan's eight-month-old startup landed $13.2 million in a seed round from a few well-known names in venture capital, namely Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital, and Hillhouse Capital Group. The round also brought in other backers, including David Velez, the founder of the neo-banking giant in Brazil, Nubank and Kunal Shah, founder and CEO of payments startup CRED.

But unlike Tez (now Google Pay), the focus is not on building a payment solution that uses Audio QR to send money in India, but instead, the startup's scope is in banking, specifically neo-banking. And epiFi's target is Indian Millenials.

As the concept of neo-banks makes the entire banking process completely digital, what epiFi hopes to provide the Gen Y demographic is a better way of handling their finances. Millennials are fastly reaching their prime earning years, so that equates to more capacity to spend and inevitably will be the default target of most businesses selling goods and services. epiFi looks to serve the maturing but more digitally savvy age group by providing insights into their spending and ultimately help in increasing savings and making better investment decisions.

"The intent is to deliver a product that touches consumers across streams, which is intuitive and simple, demystifies their finances and helps them spend intelligently. From a consumer finance perspective, they are looking for a unified experience," said co-founder and chief product and technology officer Sumit Gwalani who is another former Google pay executive like Narayanan.

The funding that the startup received will serve many purposes but will be mainly used to beef up its core technology platform, expand its team, and boost its marketing initiatives to drive sales for the company.

Shailesh Lakhani, the managing director of Sequoia Capital India, said that "consumer banking, especially key products like savings accounts, haven't seen true innovation in many years." She added that with Sujit and Sumit's vision of "reimaging consumer banking has the potential to bring a step function change in experience for digitally-savvy consumers."