Karbon Card, a start-up providing corporate cards and an emerging neobank for the new-age start-ups and small & medium businesses, has raised Rs 55 crore in a debt financing round from Northern Arc Capital, UC Inclusive Credit (UCIC) and Oxyzo Financial Services.
Bengaluru-based UCIC, incubated by Unitus Capital, is an impact focussed non-banking financial company registered with the Reserve Bank of India while Oxyzo is the lending arm of OfBusiness and is backed by Softbank.
Meanwhile, Karbon would use the funds to empower and enable start-ups and SMBs with corporate credit cards that they can use as a flexible growth capital. The Bengaluru-based start-up currently provides corporate cards and expense management solutions to over 2,000 start-ups and SMBs at present.
This is the first-ever debt round for Karbon, which has so far raised around $32 million in equity from global and marquee investors such as Ycombinator, Ramp, and Olive Tree Capital amongst others.
Founded in 2019 by Kartik Jain, Pei-fu Hsieh, Amit Jangir, and Sunil Kumar, Karbon is a corporate payment platform and an upcoming neobank for small businesses, corporates and start-ups. It provides Visa-issued corporate cards (both virtual and physical) and empowers the finance team to easily control and track expenses for the whole company.
Karbon offers start-ups with four key benefits including credit of up to Rs 25 lakh in cash with no personal guarantee or fixed deposits, seamless payments transactions through corporate cards to its customers, rewards specific to the start-ups’ requirements such as AWS credits at 12 per cent discount or SaaS products. Lastly, it helps offer expense management through WhatsApp in a very intuitive way.
Karbon intends to help start-ups and SMBs for whom the banking experience is highly broken as banks don’t consider them large enough to be served. Recently, it launched a banking product for