Former Google Pay execs raise $13.2M to build neo-banking platform for millennials in India

Published January 12, 2020

Two co-founders of Google Pay in India are building a neo-banking platform in the country — and they have already secured backing from three top VC funds.

Sujith Narayanan, a veteran payments executive who co-founded Google Pay in India (formerly known as Google Tez), said on Monday that his startup, epiFi, has raised $13.2 million in its Seed financial round led by Sequoia India and Ribbit Capital. The round valued epiFi at about $50 million.

David Velez, the founder of Brazil-based neo-banking giant Nubank, Kunal Shah, who is building his second payments startup CRED in India, and VC fund Hillhouse Capital also participated in the round.

The eight-month-old startup is working on a neo-banking platform that will focus on serving millennials in India, said Narayanan, in an interview with TechCrunch.

“When we were building Google Tez, we realized that a consumer’s financial journey extends beyond digital payments. They want insurance, lending, investment opportunities and multiple products,” he explained.

The idea, in part, is to also help users better understand how they are spending money, and guide them to make better investments and increase their savings, he said.

At this moment, it is unclear what the convergence of all of these features would look like. But Narayanan said epiFi will release an app in a few months.

Working with Narayanan on epiFi is Sumit Gwalani, who serves as the startup’s co-founder and chief product and technology officer. Gwalani previously worked as a director of product management at Google India and helped conceptualize Google Tez. In a joint interview, Gwalani said the startup currently has about two-dozen employees, some of whom have joined from Netflix, Flipkart, and PayPal.

Shailesh Lakhani, Managing Director of Sequoia Capital India, said some of the fundamental consumer banking products such as savings accounts haven’t seen true innovation in many years. “Their vision to reimagine consumer banking, by providing a modern banking product with epiFi, has the potential to bring a step function change in experience for digitally savvy consumers,” he said.

Cash dominates transactions in India today. But New Delhi’s move to invalidate most paper bills in circulation in late 2016 pushed tens of millions of Indians to explore payments app for the first time.

In recent years, scores of startups and Silicon Valley firms have stepped to help Indians pay digitally and secure a range of financial services. And all signs suggest that a significant number of people are now comfortable with mobile payments: More than 100 million users together made over 1 billion digital payments transaction in October last year — a milestone the nation has sustained in the months since.

A handful of startups are also attempting to address some of the challenges that small and medium sized businesses face. Bangalore-based Open, NiYo, and RazorPay provide a range of features such as corporate credit cards, a single dashboard to manage transactions and the ability to automate recurring payouts that traditional banks don’t currently offer. These platforms are also known as neo-bank or challenger banks or alternative banks. Interestingly, most neo-banking platforms in South Asia today serve startups and businesses — not individuals.

&Open helps businesses distribute gifts to reward customer loyalty

Published October 16, 2019

&Open is a startup with an unusual name, and one that fills an unusual niche in the business world. It has built a gift-giving platform, so that businesses can reward loyalty with a small token of appreciation. The gift depends on the business and the circumstances, but it could be something like a book or a tea towel and a recipe.

Co-founder and CEO Jonathan Legge says the Dublin-based startup fits most easily in the corporate gift-giving category, but he sees the company handling much more than that. “We are more about gifting for loyalty and customer retention. We grew out of a B2C operation in which we got visibility on this market, and then quickly evolved &Open to fulfill this market,” Legge explained.

In fact, the company developed out of a business Legge had prior to launching &Open, producing high-end gifts. As part of that business, he was finding that he would get requests from CMOs of big companies like Google, Airbnb and Jameson’s to develop gifts for their events. From that, Legge saw the potential for a full-fledged business based on that idea and he launched &Open.

He sees a world in which transactions increasingly take place in the digital realm, yet consumers still crave physical interactions with businesses beyond an email or a text thanking them. That’s where &Open can help.

“We’re filling the space of helping businesses connect with their customers and showing they care, and not by kind of devaluing their own product and putting on sales. It’s more working with the customer support team, the loyalty team or the marketing team to watch the life cycle of the customer and make sure they’re being gifted at key moments in the life cycle and within their journey with a brand,” he said.

He says this definitely is not swag like you would get a conference, but something more personal that shows the brand cares about the customer. Nor is it a set of generic gifts that every &Open customer can select from. Instead it’s a catalog it creates with each one to reflect that brand’s values.

Image: &Open

“We will design a catalog of gifts for our clients, and then they will be grouped into subsets of situations based on price. For Airbnb, the gift set could depend on whether it’s for a host or guest, and there’s different gifts within those situations. So for a host, it will be more stuff for the home such as a recipe book, a tea towel with a recipe or a guest book,” Legge said.

The company has been around since 2017 and is already in 52 countries. To make this all work, it has developed a three-part system. In addition to building a custom catalog for each brand, it has a logistics component to distribute the gift and make sure it has been delivered, and finally a technology platform that brings these different systems together.

The way it works for most customers is that the customer service team or the social media team will see situations where they think a gift is warranted, and they will log into the &Open system and choose a gift based on whatever the circumstances are — such as an apology for bad service or a reward for loyalty.

Today, the company has 25 employees, most of whom are in Dublin. The company is self-funded so far and has not sought outside investment.