Uni, an Indian startup that offers users pay-later cards, has raised $70 million in a financing round as it looks to broaden its product offerings in the South Asian market.
General Catalyst led the funding of the startup. Existing investors as well as new ones participated in the round.
Two people familiar with the matter say that the new round values Uni at $350 million. Uni was in talks to raise a round of funds.
Uni is a Bangalore-based startup that is trying to bring the benefits of credit cards to the people. Only a small portion of Indians are covered by the country's young credit rating system.
The lack of credit cards in India has created a huge whitespace for startups like Uni and Tiger Global-backed Slice to innovate on tech and reach more consumers. Uni has a pay-later card that splits the bill in three parts. Customers are not charged interest if they pay within three months. They get a 1% reward if they settle the bill in a month.
The startup launched its own credit card in June this year and already disburses $23 million to its customers each month. The startup did not say how many users it has, but it did say that its customers are spread across 50 Indian cities.
Uni was co-founded by Nitin Gupta, who co-founded PayU India and then ran the financial services business at Ola. The startup was backed by Lightspeed and Accel at a time when it had yet to launch a product.
There is a lot of room for innovation in the Indian credit market. The Pay 1/3rd card is a first of its kind card in the market and hasn't looked back since we found a strong product-market fit. The biggest potential lies in the Pay 1/3rd category and we are leading this space with our innovative product and customer experience. Some of the best investors in the world are partnering with us as we gear up for our next phase of growth.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Gupta said that the startup is working on developing a number of new products and is aiming to expand its monthly disbursement to $197 million in the next nine months.
Alex Tran, Managing Director at General Catalyst, said in a statement that they were excited to be partnering with the Uni team as they build category defining financial services products for Indian consumers. India is one of the few countries in the world where the opportunity for credit expansion is as large as it is. We are excited to support a team that is focused on product and customer delight while also being world-class on credit, risk, and payments.
According to analysts at Bernstein, pay later players finance loans worth $500 million a year. They think the figure will balloon to $26 billion by the year 2025.
