Spense

Spense operates as a fintech infrastructure provider, positioning itself as a core banking operating system for financial institutions in India. Founded in 2022 by Pawan Kumar, Srinivas Krishnamurthy, and Iqbal Mohammed, the Bengaluru-based startup aims to modernize the country's financial rails. Kumar, the CEO, previously served as the Head of Applied Science at Uber India, while CTO Krishnamurthy was a Technical Lead at BNP Paribas, bringing a blend of applied science and core financial technology experience to the venture.

The company's primary business involves offering a full-stack platform with APIs, developer tools, and modular SDKs to regulated entities like banks and other financial service providers. This enables clients to rapidly develop and launch digital financial products such as secured credit cards, prepaid cards, and forex programs. Spense's model focuses on simplifying the complex processes required to bring new financial products to market, ensuring compliance with regulatory norms, auditability, and seamless integration with existing legacy systems. The business generates revenue by providing this infrastructure, which helps banks to innovate responsibly and fintechs to build and deploy their services faster.

Spense's core product is a programmable banking and card infrastructure that addresses a significant market gap: access to credit. A key use case highlighted by the company is enabling banks to easily issue a credit card to any customer with a fixed deposit. The platform's features are comprehensive, covering KYC onboarding, digital account creation, deposits, various card issuance types, UPI 2.0 integration, and access to investment products like mutual funds and digital gold. By providing these tools, Spense allows its clients to create their own neobanking experiences or embed financial services into their existing offerings. In June 2025, the company announced it had raised $1.85 million in a pre-seed funding round to onboard more banks, expand its partnerships, and broaden its product suite beyond credit cards. Keywords: fintech infrastructure, banking as a service, BaaS, API platform, secured credit cards, digital banking, prepaid cards, forex programs, core banking, financial services API, payment infrastructure, neobanking platform, KYC solutions, digital onboarding, lending infrastructure, card issuance, UPI integration, wealth management API, Spense.money, Pawan Kumar, Srinivas Krishnamurthy, GrowthCap Ventures