Consumer fintech startup Bright Money raised $62 M Series B funding from multiple investors
Bright Money, a consumer fintech startup with offices in Bengaluru and San Francisco, has raised $62 million in what appears to be a Series B round of funding. The funding is made up of $12 million in equity led by Alpha Wave, Hummingbird, and Peak XV Partners and $50 million in debt from Encina Lender Finance.
In the US and Canada, Encina Lender Finance offers lending solutions to consumer and business specialty finance companies.
A $31 million Series A round for Bright Money was led by Peak XV, Falcon Edge Capital, and Hummingbird Ventures in September 2021. According to a press release from the company, the new funding will allow Bright Money to aggressively target millennials, particularly in the US.
Four-year-old Bright Money offers products like credit score improvement, automated debt repayment plans, financial planning software, budgeting tools, and refinancing loans to assist consumers in getting out of debt. It deals in student, auto, and credit card loans.
With the help of big data and AI, the company hopes to transform how international retail banks run. More than 180 people work for it currently, with the majority of the core product, tech, data, marketing, and service teams all based in India.
Bright Money was a member of the first cohort of Peak XV Partner’s Surge and was founded by Avi Patchava, Petko Plachkov, Varun Modi, Alex Seyfert, Avinash Ramakath, and Amit Bendale. Additionally, it has the support of Kunal Shah of CRED, Naveen Tewari and Abhay Singhal of InMobi, Jitendra Gupta of Jupiter, and Kunal Shah of InMobi.
According to reports, the company let go of 100 employees—or 50% of its workforce—in July of last year, citing a shaky funding environment and the need to reduce costs to extend the runway.
