Kiwi, a fintech startup, has raised $24 million (Rs 208 crore) in its Series B round, which was led by Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India and included existing backers Nexus Venture Partners, Stellaris Venture Partners, and Omidyar Network.

The fund raised will be utilized to boost customer acquisition, enhance unit economics, and expedite Kiwi's product roadmap.

Key Highlights

• Kiwi raises $24 million in Series B led by Vertex Ventures; existing investors also participate.
• Funds to bolster UPI-linked RuPay credit cards; Kiwi targets profitability within two years. 

Kiwi, which was established in 2022 by Siddharth Mehta, Mohit Bedi, and Anup Agrawal, combines the convenience of credit with the broad merchant acceptance of UPI to enable users to access RuPay credit cards through UPI.

Over 2 lakh RuPay Credit Cards have reportedly been issued since the startup's founding, and it currently processes over 5 million merchant transactions per month across 600 cities.

Also Read: SBI to Revise Credit Card Rules Effective 16 September 2025

This fiscal year, Kiwi is in negotiations with two additional major banking partners in addition to its current partnerships with YES Bank and AU Small Finance Bank. The company plans to issue one million RuPay credit cards by 2027.

The funding comes at a time when fintech companies such as LazyPay, OneCard, Uni, and Slice are stepping up efforts to increase credit access via UPI. India now has over 350 million unique UPI users, which is nearly eight to ten times the number of credit card users. The acceptance network for UPI credit is estimated to be 35 times larger than that of traditional credit cards.

According to startup data intelligence platform TheKredible, Siddharth Mehta, Anup Agarwal, and Mohit Bedi each own approximately 16.2% of Kiwi following the Series A round, with Nexus being the largest external stakeholder in the three-year-old startup. It will be interesting to see how much equity the founders dilute in the Series B round.