Fintech startup Jodo raises $15 million in Series A round led by Tiger Global

Representative image.

Bengaluru-based fintech startup Jodo raised $15 million in a Series A round led by Tiger Global and joined by existing investors Elevation Capital and Matrix Partners India.

The fundraise took place at a post-money valuation of $90 million. Tiger Global will hold around 11 percent stake in the parent entity Bharosepe Technology Services, while Matrix Partners and Elevation Capital will together hold over 13 per cent. In a previous round in 2020, the startup had raised $3.8 million from Matrix Partners and Elevation Capital.

Meanwhile, Tiger Global has been on a roll in India in 2022 with its early stage and Series A  investments. The global investment firm has already deployed nearly $400 million in India across 12 such deals in early stage funding.

The fresh capital will be utilised for product development, expanding teams and product reach.

Founded in 2020 by Atulya Bhat, Raghav Nagarajan and Koustav Dey, Jodo is a fintech product creating solutions enabling parents to plan and pay education fees for their kids.

“In Indian middle class families, almost 15-20 per cent of their annual income goes into their kids’ education. We are helping them with solutions to plan and split this expense depending on their needs. We partner with educational institutions and financial services companies to enable the same,” Bhat told Moneycontrol in an interview.

Jodo approaches schools and educational institutions helping them manage their revenue while figuring out easing payments for parents. The startup has been in testing and developing some new features around automated recurring payments of school fees and smoother instant payments of large-ticket sizes ideal for education fees on the B2C side.

Bhat said, “Over the next 18 to 24 months, we are focusing on our current product itself, we work with about 100 institutes in the next 18 months, we want to get to about 5,000 Institutes where, where our products are being used to streamline fee collections. We have a pipeline of products, we want to introduce along these lines to improve fee collection efficiency to make vehicle fee payments convenient for parents and students will digitize the entire process.”

“Obviously, the other thing is to build a team to execute this both expansion to Institute's and expansion of product lines. We will continue to pay and hire fantastic quality talent to enable us to do this. We are about 150 members right now,” he added.

Jodo plans to more than double the team size to 300-350 over the next 18 months.

Alex Cook, partner at Tiger Global, said, “Jodo is modernising payments and credit for India’s education market by increasing convenience and affordability for parents and providing a better workflow for schools and institutions. We are very impressed with Jodo’s progress and are excited to partner with them as they expand the product suite and become available at more schools.”