Spense, a pioneering banking infrastructure company combining asset-backed credit architecture with agentic AI, today announced it has raised $2.8 million in a Seed funding round. The investment was led by Arkam Ventures, with strong participation from high-profile institutional investors including Razorpay Ventures, GrowthCap Ventures, and Atrium Ventures.
The newly raised capital will be strategically deployed to deepen enterprise banking partnerships, accelerate core product engineering, and expand the startup's localized technical and go-to-market teams. Additionally, the funds will drive the highly anticipated rollout of Credit Line on UPI (CLOU), furthering Spense’s long-term vision of establishing the definitive agentic infrastructure and intelligence layer for the future of secured retail finance.
The financing round also featured an elite roster of angel investors and technology operators, including:
Kunal Shah (Founder, CRED)
Madhusudhan E (Co-founder & CEO, KreditBee)
Ravishankar (Co-founder, Active.ai)
Suresh Rayasam Venkatasubbaih (Executive Leader, LinkedIn)
Sayandeb Banerjee (Co-founder, The Math Company)
Unlocking India's Trillion-Dollar Dormant Capital Ecosystem
The overarching thesis behind Spense’s growth is a structural shift in the Indian lending landscape. The country's next explosive credit expansion will not be sustained by unsecured personal loans or high-interest digital credit apps. Instead, the upcoming macroeconomic growth wave will be powered by the trillions of dollars in hard financial assets that currently sit isolated from the formal digital credit ecosystem.
Across Indian households, small-to-medium businesses (SMBs), and large commercial institutions, immense capital sits trapped within fixed deposits, mutual funds, domestic equities, sovereign bonds, trade invoices, and real estate. While these vehicles represent massive baseline financial strength, they remain operationally idle. The infrastructure required to seamlessly convert them into agile, modern credit instruments has historically been fragmented, manual, and prohibitively expensive for banks to run.
For decades, borrowing against these holdings meant applying for rigid "term loans"—a process bogged down by slow, document-heavy onboarding, manual valuation checks, and one-time cash disbursements that required full repayment before capital could ever be re-accessed. Spense challenges this paradigm. The team believes asset-backed borrowing should be instant, continuous, and highly rewarding—functioning with the seamless utility of a premium credit card.
High-Performance Bank-Native Architecture Powered by Agentic AI
Founded by technology innovators Pawan Kumar and Srinivas Krishnamurthy, Spense offers a bank-native software platform that empowers financial institutions to roll out credit lines and credit cards backed by multi-asset collateral instantly, without replacing their legacy core banking technology infrastructure.
By deploying advanced API middleware, Spense bridges core banking nodes, retail deposit engines, and modern card management systems in real time. The platform stands out because it combines programmable credit pipes with continuous agentic AI workflows:
Autonomous Operational Agents: Runs non-stop background agents to handle intensive user onboarding, collateral valuation, automated compliance, and localized customer care.
Drastic Overhead Reduction: Eliminates the need for massive, high-overhead physical operations teams, allowing lenders to scale secured credit products cost-effectively.
Rapid Enterprise Integration: Connects seamlessly with old-line core banking platforms, bypassing lengthy, multi-year internal software transformations.
Frictionless Fintech Distribution: Empowers consumer-facing fintech applications to integrate secure, asset-backed credit options smoothly into their existing user flows.
The market has responded with massive demand. Spense currently partners with 7 major commercial banks across India, including one of the subcontinent's largest public sector institutions, alongside a growing pipeline of digital fintech distributors. Today, the Spense infrastructure powers over 2 lakh (200,000) active credit cards and orchestrates the issuance of over 40,000 fresh cards monthly—accounting for approximately 8% of India’s total monthly credit card issuances.
Executive Viewpoints on India's Next Credit Supercycle
The leadership team emphasizes that solving India's deep liquidity demands requires a radical infrastructure shift rather than simple risk-modeling updates.
“India’s credit access challenge is frequently misdiagnosed as a risk or underwriting problem. We firmly believe it is fundamentally an infrastructure problem," stated Pawan Kumar, Co-founder & CEO of Spense. "India does not suffer from a shortage of household or business assets; it suffers from a lack of flexible infrastructure capable of turning those dormant holdings into usable, real-time credit lines. If an individual or business owns a verifiable, high-value asset, they deserve immediate, frictionless access to modern liquidity."
Highlighting the deep engineering milestones underlying the platform, Srinivas Krishnamurthy, Co-founder & CTO of Spense, added:
“For the past few decades, the banking industry focused heavily on digitizing ledger accounts, retail payments, and everyday transactions. The next grand phase of financial technology centers on the absolute digitization of collateral itself. When physical and digital assets become entirely programmable, credit becomes instant. When agentic AI becomes fully operational, scaling credit becomes seamless. Together, these parallel shifts will fundamentally redefine how traditional financial institutions originate, manage, and service loans.”
Visionary Institutional Backing for Category-Defining Infrastructure
The investment from Arkam Ventures signals strong confidence in foundational, non-consensus technology bets designed to address structural gaps across the Indian economy. Commenting on the investment rationale, Bala Srinivasa, Managing Director at Arkam Ventures, noted:
“We backed Pawan and Srinivas because we are convinced that Spense is engineering the foundational technological bedrock for the next generation of credit across the Indian subcontinent. As macro lending trends shift toward safer, highly sustainable, asset-backed models, robust infrastructure platforms like Spense will be vital in helping legacy financial institutions scale responsibly while significantly expanding access to formal, safe credit for millions.”
About Spense
Founded in 2022 and headquartered in Bengaluru, Spense is a banking infrastructure developer engineered to help institutional lenders unlock credit against customer assets. Its proprietary platform integrates programmable asset-backed APIs with agentic AI operations, allowing major banks to build, deploy, and scale modern secured lending cards without dismantling legacy software.
About Arkam Ventures
Arkam Ventures is an early-stage, operator-led venture capital firm focused on backing non-consensus founders building foundational tech for India's digital economy. The firm manages a diverse portfolio across fintech, spacetech, and SaaS, including market leaders such as Skyroot Aerospace, Jar, KreditBee, Wint Wealth, SpotDraft, TransBnk, and Ringg AI.
