Karbon Card raises $15 mn from Olive Tree, Harmony, Avenir and others

Existing investors Ramp, Mercury and Orios Venture Partners also participated in current round, which has taken the total amount raised by Karbon to about $32 million

Karbon Card (Karbon), a leading fintech offering corporate cards, has raised yet another funding of $15 million in a Series A led by Olive Tree Capital, Harmony and AvenirGrowth Capital with a vision to become India’s firstNeobank designed especially for the corporates.

Existing investors Ramp, Mercury and Orios Venture Partners also participated in the current round.

The new round of funding comes in less than four months of the company raising a Pre-Series A of $12 million in September last year. With the current round, the total funding raised by Karbon stands at around $32 million.

The startup, which counts Y Combinator as its early backer, will use funds to step up product development, hiring plans and operations as it transitionsintoIndia’s first corporate Neobank this year.

Founded in 2019 by Pei-fu Hsieh, Amit Jangir, Kartik Jain and Sunil Sinha, Karbon is an expense management platform for small businesses, enterprises, corporates and startups. 

“We now have the resources to build an even more compelling product and service to all our current and future customers,” said Karbon’s Co-founder Amit Jangir. “We now have more than 2000 companies as happy customers and are determined to grow this by many times this year.”

From small cash management, expense report automation, prepaid cards for business expenses, travel and expense management, employee flexible benefits, international travel cards to a digital marketing expense card, Karbon’s centralised platform helps businesses improve their efficiency and productivity by multi-folds. 

While Karbon’score benefit remains to provide quicker and hassle-free credit card access for corporate spending, there is growing interest in safety and demand for secured products and services. The firm said, hence the transition to Neobank becomes a natural progression. With the latest funding, Karbon said it is in the position to become the largest player in the expense management segment and overtake players like Happay.

Karbon closed 2021 with a monthly GTV (gross transaction value) of $30 million and expects to grow the GTV to $200 million per month in 2022 as credit demand picks up pace.

“Over the past five years, we have evaluated emerging corporate card players globally and ultimately backed Ramp in the USA. With a world-class leadership team and remarkable traction to date, we are excited to lead Karbon’s Series A,” said Nick Eliovits, managing partner of Olive Tree Capital. “The adoption for corporate cards in India is still nascent compared with developed markets, and as the market leader, we expect Karbon to introduce corporate cards to tens of thousands of Indian companies in the near term and beyond.”

The Bengaluru-headquartered company offers startups with four key benefits such as credit of up to Rs 5 crore with no personal guarantee or fixed deposits. It provides seamless payments transactions through corporate cards to its customers, offers rewards specific to the startups' requirements such as AWS credits with $50,000 or SaaS products. It also helps offer expense management through WhatsApp in a very intuitive way.

The firm which makes money mostly off interchange fees, aims to solve a major problem for small businesses and startups by replacing the use of personal credit cards for company usage with corporate cards. Using personal credit cards for company usage affects personal credit score, reimbursement hassles and creates confusion to segregate personal and corporate expenses.