Bright Money raises $31 million led by Sequoia, Falcon Edge and Hummingbird Ventures

San Francisco-headquartered artificial intelligence (AI) personal finance platform Bright Money said on September 16 that it has raised $31 million led by Sequoia Capital, Falcon Edge Capital and Hummingbird Ventures in its Series A round funding.

The fintech, which also has presence in Bengaluru, was founded in 2019 by Avi Patchava, former InMobi executive Varun Modi, and ex-McKinsey executive Petko Plachkov. Bright Money focuses on individualized wealth planning and building and debt management for over 30,000 customers in the US using its trademarked MoneyScience algorithm.

With 150 employees currently, the company said it will use the funding to double its team ahead of a public launch and will also expand its product in the Indian and South East Asian markets.

Avi Patchava, Co-founder of Bright Money said, “When we started building Bright Money in 2019, we set out to launch a unique system powered by data science to help our customers organize their finances and tackle their debt. The Series A funding we have secured will allow us to take our platform to the next level, by providing users with a transformative journey with their money to really achieve their financial futures.”

“Applications of Data Science and machine learning to Banking and Financial services have been very limited. Bright is a Data Science-first company where we apply predictive intelligence into every corner of our product, covering data enrichment, financial planning, customer communications, banking systems and user experience. This is the beginning of seeing Data Science first tech being built from India, for the global consumer,” Varun Modi, Co-founder of Bright Money added.

The company said that its customers reduced $440 on an average in debt within the first three months of joining the platform and saved $750 per year in interest expenses.

Harshjit Sethi, MD, Sequoia India said, “The future of financial services is personalized advice and products available real time and at scale. Bright has meticulously built an intelligent product that provides every user with contextualized financial suggestions on debt and savings to improve their financial wellbeing. We have been very impressed with the product's initial success in driving financial outcomes for its 30,000 users as evidenced through their high retention rates and NPS.”

Apart from the venture funds, Bright Money has also raised funding from angel investors including Naveen Tewari and Abhay Singhal of InMobi, Kunal Shah of CRED, Jitendra Gupta of Jupiter, Gunjan Soni of Zalora, Pradeep Parameswaran of Uber, notably, Ram Shriram - a technology investor who is one of the early investors in Google and currently on the board of Alphabet.

Although the quantum of the company’s seed funding is not known, Bright Money was a part of the first cohort of Surge, Sequoia India’s scale-up program.