Spense Raises $2.8 Mn To Expand AI-Powered Asset-Backed Credit Platform
The company will use the fresh capital to strengthen banking partnerships, accelerate product development, and expand its engineering and go-to-market teams.
Bengaluru-based banking infrastructure startup Spense has raised $2.8 million in a seed funding round led by Arkam Ventures, with participation from Razorpay Ventures, GrowthCap Ventures, and Atrium Ventures.
The company will use the fresh capital to strengthen banking partnerships, accelerate product development, expand its engineering and go-to-market teams, launch its Credit Line on UPI (CLOU) offering, and advance its agentic AI-powered asset-backed credit infrastructure.
The round also attracted several fintech and technology leaders, including Kunal Shah of CRED, Madhusudhan E of KreditBee, Ravishankar of Active.ai, Suresh Rayasam Venkatasubbaih of LinkedIn, and Sayandeb Banerjee of The Math Company.
Founded by Pawan Kumar and Srinivas Krishnamurthy, Spense enables banks to launch credit cards and credit lines backed by customer assets without replacing existing core banking infrastructure. Its platform uses agentic AI to automate processes such as onboarding, servicing, collections, and customer support, helping financial institutions scale secured lending more efficiently.
Spense currently partners with seven major banks in India, including a leading public sector bank. The platform powers over 200,000 active cards and issues more than 40,000 cards every month.
“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. If you have a valuable asset, you should have access to modern credit,” said Pawan Kumar, Spense Co-founder & CEO.
“For decades, banks digitised accounts, payments and transactions. The next phase of banking is the digitisation of collateral itself. When assets become programmable, credit becomes real-time. When AI becomes operationally reliable, banking becomes dramatically more scalable. Together, these shifts will redefine how financial institutions originate, operate and service credit,” Srinivas Krishnamurthy, Spense Co-founder & CTO, added.
Spense aims to help financial institutions offer instant, reusable credit products backed by assets such as fixed deposits, investments, and business receivables.
