Kumar Bahukhandi
GrowthCap Ventures today announced its continued investment in Bengaluru-based portfolio company Spense, participating in the company’s USD 2.8 million Seed round led by Arkam Ventures, alongside Razorpay Ventures, Atrium Ventures, and a distinguished group of fintech and technology operators including Kunal Shah (CRED), Madhusudhan E (KreditBee), Ravishankar (Active.ai), Suresh Rayasam Venkatasubbaih (LinkedIn), and Sayandeb Banerjee (The Math Company). The round marks an important milestone for the company and reinforces growing institutional conviction in the future of asset-backed credit infrastructure.
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Spense Founders and Growthcap Ventures Team, From Left to right – Srinivas Krishnamurthy, Pratekk Agarwaal, Pawan Kumar, Neeti Bokaria Source: Growthcap Ventures (Investors)
GrowthCap Ventures was the first institutional investor in Spense, leading the company’s pre-seed round in May 2025, and has continued to back the company as it scales. The follow-on investment reflects GrowthCap’s conviction in both the founders and the emerging opportunity to build the infrastructure powering India’s next generation of credit.
As India’s credit ecosystem evolves beyond unsecured lending, a vast pool of assets—including fixed deposits, mutual funds, equities, invoices and other financial assets—remains underutilised within the formal credit system. Spense enables banks to transform these assets into modern credit products through a bank-native infrastructure layer that integrates seamlessly with existing banking systems.
The company has already partnered with leading institutions to launch secured credit cards and credit lines backed by customer assets. Today, Spense works with seven major banks, powers over 2 lakh active cards, issues more than 40,000 cards every month, and contributes to nearly 8% of India’s monthly credit card issuance, underscoring the growing demand for modern asset-backed lending infrastructure.
The fresh capital will be used to deepen banking partnerships, accelerate product development, expand engineering and go-to-market teams, launch Credit Line on UPI (CLOU), and further build the infrastructure and intelligence layer for the future of asset-backed credit.
“India’s credit challenge is often viewed as a risk problem. We believe it is fundamentally an infrastructure problem. India does not have a shortage of assets. It has a shortage of infrastructure that can convert those assets into usable credit. We believe the next generation of banking will be built on two foundations: infrastructure that unlocks assets and AI that makes credit intelligent, scalable and accessible. If you have a valuable asset, you should have access to modern credit,” Pawan Kumar, Co-founder & CEO, Spense.
“For decades, banks digitized accounts, payments and transactions. The next phase of banking is the digitization of collateral itself,” Srinivas Krishnamurthy, Co-founder & CTO, Spense.
“We invested in Spense at the pre-seed stage because we believed asset-backed credit would become one of the defining themes in financial services. Pawan and Srinivas have demonstrated exceptional clarity of vision and execution, building infrastructure that enables banks to unlock liquidity against assets at scale. We’re delighted to welcome Arkam Ventures and our fellow investors, and are excited to continue supporting the team as they build the future of banking infrastructure in India,” Pratekk Agarwaal, Founder & General Partner, GrowthCap Ventures.
About GrowthCap Ventures
GrowthCap Ventures is an operator-led early-stage venture capital firm focused on backing category-defining startups across FinTech, AI and DeepTech. The firm partners with founders from the earliest stages of company building, often as the first institutional investor, providing not only capital but also hands-on operational support, strategic guidance and access to an extensive network of founders, operators and enterprise partners.
The continued investment in Spense reflects GrowthCap’s high-conviction approach of backing exceptional founders early and supporting them through successive stages of growth. As an operator-led fund, GrowthCap works closely with portfolio companies on product strategy, customer introductions, hiring, fundraising and long-term company building.
Spense’s successful upround is another example of GrowthCap Ventures’ commitment to identifying category leaders early and partnering with founders building the next generation of foundational technology companies from India.
