[Funding alert] Buildd raises $2 mn led by Picus Capital, Mankekar Family Office

Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) based startup Buildd has raised $2 million in its Pre-Seed funding round from Picus Capital, a early-stage venture capital firm and the Mankekar Family Office.

The platform is backed by founders including Aniruddha Patwardhan (Engineering Head, PhonePe); Ranjeet Singh (Co-founder of Pratilipi) ; Kunal Sharma (ex-Freecharge) ; Nitin Agarwal (Founder of B21) and Kedar Swadi (Data Science Head, Phonepe).

Pune-based Buildd was founded in 2020 by Sachin Gaikwad, It is an embedded platform to help banks and technology platforms, especially fintechs, direct-to-consumer (D2C) ecommerce platforms, software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies and corporates launch financial products and services.

According to the statement, the sandbox platform with a variety of bundled tools for virtual cards, deposit accounts, BNPLs, lines of credit, receivables factoring, B2B payments, KYC/AML compliance management, onboarding, escrow and much more. This empowers users to focus on creating the best possible user experience, while Build handles the complexities of working with the legacy technical infrastructure of financial institutions as well as compliance with regulatory and compliance requirements.

Global BaaS based players such as Railsbank, SynapseFi and Solarisbankhave been highly successful in targeting fintechs as their clients. Startups like Buildd have now emerged in the BaaS 2.0 wave, with a focus on including non-fintechs as well, through a more full-stack approach to serving the platform.

The newly formed startup has already launched its first set of bundled credit + API based solutions in partnership with several banking and NBFC players, and will now start product expansion in Buy-Now-Pay-Later (BNPL) and Card domains. Also strengthen its technical team by rapidly adding 50 full stack engineers.

“We are excited to partner with our investors who have deep experience in the financial infrastructure and tooling space and share our belief in the future of API driven banking. Our team is a heady mix of seasoned fintech experts & bankers, who have worked together for multiple years across startups, whose insights over the past 15 years in banking and fintech have helped us create a plug-and-play microservices architecture for the entire banking stack, giving it strength of compliance, flexible workflows and scalability”, said, Sachin Gaikwad, Founder & CEO, Buildd.

“One of our core hypotheses for the Indian market is increasing penetration of financial services, hence we are excited to partner with Buildd on their mission of becoming the leading BaaS provider in the region. We believe that their banking domain expertise and fintech experience will enable them to build a superior product to deliver the underlying infrastructure for fintech innovation as well as embedded financial services,” said, Florian Reichert, partner, Picus Capital.

About Buildd

Embedded Finance APIs for all developers. Design, Test and Deploy Finance Products in real time.