Fintech startup Kiwi has raised $24 million (₹208 crore) in a Series B funding round led by Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India and continuing existing investors Nexus Venture Partners, Stellaris Venture Partners, and Omidyar Network. The investment will be used to scale Kiwi’s credit-on-UPI initiative, targeting the mass issuance of RuPay credit cards that would work on India’s UPI payment system.
Founded in 2022 by Siddharth Mehta, Mohit Bedi, and Anup Agrawal, Kiwi has already issued more than 200,000 RuPay credit cards and now sees over five million monthly merchant transactions across 600 cities. It has partnerships with YES Bank and AU Small Finance Bank, and plan to add two additional banking partners this year.
Kiwi is targeting issuance of one million RuPay credit cards by 2027 and aims to be profitable in 2 years. The cash will be used to further product development, build customer acquisitions and improve unit economics. As India’s digital payments ecosystem continues to grow, Kiwi is focusing on credit-on-UPI to access a market where UPI users (200 million) outnumber the number of credit card holders (25 million) 8–10 times.
