Neobank Jupiter has raised $86 million as part of its Series C fundraise, according to regulatory filings accessed through Tofler.
The round was led by US-based QED Investors and Sequoia Growth fund and also saw participation from other existing investors such as Tiger Global, Matrix Partners, 3one4 Capital and BEENEXT. This is Jupiter’s second round of fundraising in 2021, a year that witnessed an unprecedented funding boom for startups.
In an exclusive conversation with Moneycontrol, the startup’s founder and CEO Jitendra Gupta confirmed the fundraise and said that the valuation for the company now stands at $710 million. This is a jump of close to 2.5x in valuation from the previous round, which valued Jupiter at $293 million.
Founded in 2019, Jupiter is a digital banking platform that allows users to open a bank account digitally, provides Visa debit cards and insights on spends by customers in partnership with Federal Bank and Axis Bank.
Speaking on how the startup will use the funds, Gupta said, “We will continue to invest in customer acquisition with an aim to have a million customers by April 2022. We will also look at entering lending in the coming year.”
Jupiter, which has a non-banking financial company (NBFC) license of its own, is planning to lend from its own book to provide a credit line to individuals and also personal loans. The company currently has close to half a million users.
In an interview with Moneycontrol on October 26, Gupta had said Jupiter will start by lending to only its customers that hold bank accounts through the platform. Credit requirements of these customers are expected to be in the range of Rs 10,000 to as high as Rs 3 lakh and the startup plans to do the risk assessment and underwriting for these loans with its in-house team as well as using credit bureau scores.
According to the regulatory filings, promoter shareholding in the startup will drop from 46 percent to 40 percent, with the rest 60 percent being held by institutional and other investors.
In terms of financials, Jupiter's losses grew from Rs 6 crore in FY20 to Rs 14 crore in FY21. Revenues grew from Rs 5 lakh to Rs 11.79 crore in FY21, a growth of 215 percent. Expenses too saw a jumped from Rs 6 crore in FY20 to Rs 26 crore in FY21, as per regulatory filings accessed through Tofler.
In its Series B round in August 2021, Jupiter had raised $44 million led by Brazil’s Nubank Global Founders Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Matrix Partners India. The round was supplemented with a $10-million raise from QED Investors.
At $710 million, Jupiter is in touching distance of the $1-billion valuation, which will make the startup a unicorn. However, Gupta said that the company is not looking to raise any more funds for the next 12-18 months.
“Frankly, our burn rate is very low. We still have 50 percent of the Series A funds left in the bank and Series B funds are untouched,” he added.
This fundraising is in line with the momentum seen in 2021, with founders raising multiple rounds to make the most of the lush liquidity scenario.
Jupiter is Gupta’s second startup after CitrusPay, which he sold to Naspers-owned PayU in 2016 in a $130-million deal and was recorded as one of the largest exits in the Indian fintech services ecosystem at the time.
Jupiter had raised $25 million in a Series A round from investors like Sequoia, Matrix Partners, 3one4 Capital, former Tiger Global head honcho Lee Fixel and others while the startup was still in stealth mode.
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