Zolve Innovations, which operates a neobank that aims to ease access to financial services for users travelling from India to the US or vice versa, has secured $15 million in a seed round led by Accel and Lightspeed.
The round also saw participation from Blume Ventures and angel investors including Dr. Ashish Gupta, former Helion MD; Greg Kidd, angel investor in Twitter and Ripple; Kunal Shah, founder of Cred; Rahul Mehta, managing partner at DST Global and Rahul Kishore, senior managing director, Coatue Capital.
It is also the first investment of the Founder Collective (investor in Airtable and Uber) in an Indian startup, according to a blog post.
Zolve was founded in December 2020 by TaxiForSure founder Raghunandan G. An angel investor in several startups, Raghunandan, sold his ride hailing startup to cab aggregation major Ola for $200 million in early 2015.
According to the blog post, the idea for Zolve came out of a dinner in New York when Raghunandan saw his friends paying using debit cards instead of credit cards because they weren’t eligible for financial products in the US.
Banks in the US, as in several other countries, rely on credit scores to provide financial services to customers.
“Despite years of stellar credit history in India (his friends) had an uphill task in securing credit cards with decent spending limits on them in the US because the financial systems of one country do not talk to the financial systems of another country,” the post noted.
Moreover, individuals with financial identities in multiple countries have to juggle between different regulations and systems as they manage expenses and taxes across borders.
To solve this problem, cross-border neobank Zolve is looking to enable users to access multiple financial products across geographies on a single platform.
