Mumbai-based Drona Pay raised a Seed round of Rs 3.2 crore from Varanium Capital, Credit Saison, and fintech veterans including Kunal Shah, Jitendra Gupta, Amrish Rau and others, the company said in a statement.
Founded in 2021 by Satish Kashyap, Pallavi Narvekar and Sukhdev Sinh Zala, Drona Pay uses machine learning and proprietary data sets to protect institutions against frauds in terms of payments and lending.
It protects the buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) unified payment interface (UPI), and credit card and debit card transactions from frauds, scams, collusion and delinquency, the statement said.
The Seed round will help the company expand its technical and product teams and strengthen its offerings. It will also help it penetrate the Indian banking and fintech space.
"The array of new products launched by Indian fintechs and banks will need robust real-time risk scoring abilities which are provided by Drona Pay,” said Kashyap, Co-founder & CEO, Drona Pay in the statement.
The startup provides an end-to-end framework covering real-time risk scoring, and case management and analytics to help BNPL, banks, payment processors and fintechs, and integrate new rules and models to tackle risk patterns, the statement said.
“While we initially saw the savings for BNPL from delinquency reduction, we were impressed with the team's ability to reduce merchant fraud and chargebacks for payment providers, which convinced us of the huge potential and the teams’ capabilities,” said Aparajit Bhandarkar, Partner, Varanium Capital.
Founded in 1990, Varanium Capital Advisors Private Limited (VCAPL) is a Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi)-licensed portfolio manager that provides investment solutions and advisory, the statement said
However, Credit Saison Co. Ltd., commonly known as Credit Saison or simply Saison, is a Japanese financial services company affiliated with the Mizuho Financial Group. It claims to be the third-largest credit-card issuer, with over 20 million cardholders in Japan, behind JCB and Visa Japan. Credit Saison India (Kisetsu Saison Finance India Pvt. Ltd.) is a fully-owned subsidiary of Credit Saison Co. Ltd.
Recently, Credit Saison invested in Globalise, along with Whiteboard Capital and other angel investors.
The rise of digital payments has increased fraudulent activities and to tackle that problem, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) will open the fourth cohort under the Regulatory Sandbox (RS) on the prevention and mitigation of financial frauds.