India Corporate Card Startup Karbon Lands Funding

In seed funding from well-known angel investors, corporate card FinTech Karbon Card has notched $2 million. Amrish Rau, the PayU founder and Pine Labs CEO, and Kunal Shah, Cred founder, are among the investors, VCCircle reported.

Amit Jangir and Pei-fu Hsieh started Karbon Card last year. The firm offers an alternative to corporate cards. It reportedly has products that don’t mandate strict terms like high fixed-deposit collaterals and personal guarantees. Hsieh said per reports, “Our vision is to empower all startups to achieve more through a Karbon Card.”

The firm, which is based in Bengaluru, said per the report it would put the funding toward operations, market growth and product development. Karbon Card claims that funded upstarts with over Rs 25 lakh (approximately $33,600) can receive credit.

The company also has a expense management tool that allows founders of upstarts to make sense of their company spending and changes their capital flows.

In separate news, India landed its first SMB credit card via EnKash per news last summer. EnKash was aiming to reach startups with the credit card product, connecting small and medium-sized businesses with a revolving credit line to pay vendors, manage employee travel expenses, pay ultities and more.

The Freedom Card also on-boards users to the EnKash platform to automate accounts payable and accounts receivable operations per reports.

EnKash co-founder Naveen Bindal in a statement at the time, “Currently banks offer corporate credit cards and we partner with most of them to enhance the experience.” Bindal continued, “While we continue enhancing our capabilities for these bank partnerships, we realized that specific products are required to address use cases which are peculiar to underserved SMEs and startups as their requirements are different.”

Reports also surfaced in December that Walmart India was collaborating on a commercial card solution for its business wholesale customers. Walmart India was reportedly teaming with HDFC Bank to roll out a co-branded credit card for the business members of the retailer’s Best Price Modern Wholesale “B2B Cash & Carry” stores.