Sequoia-backed expense manager Walnut names Anurag Sinha as co-founder

SAIF Partners- and Sequoia Capital- backed personal finance management app Walnut has named Anurag Sinha as co-founder and chief business officer.

Sinha, an IIM Bangalore and IIT-BHU alumnus, was earlier with ICICI Bank as deputy general manager, strategic investments and payment solutions.

At Walnut, he will be responsible for leading the company's business development and strategy, and expanding its product portfolio. He will play a key role in introducing new product features in collaboration with banks and non-banking financial companies (NBFCs).

"Anurag's expertise in payments and lending is an invaluable asset to us as we add new products and monetisation capabilities to Walnut," said Amit Bhor, co-founder and chief executive, Walnut.

The Walnut app reads text messages on the phone and categorises them to give graphic analysis periodically. It also generates visualisation of monthly expenditure and facilitates debit card-to-debit card peer-to-peer (P2P) payments without the need of bank account details.

The company, run by Thumbworks Technologies Pvt. Ltd, was founded in October 2014 by Bhor and Patanjali Somayaji. Both of them worked at Motorola Mobility earlier.

According to filings made with Registrar of Companies (RoC), Walnut received a seed investment of $7.9 million from SAIF Partners and Sequoia Capital in May 2015.

Several expense managers have attracted investors' interest in the last few months. In June, personal finance manager MoneyView raised $9.71 million in its Series B round of funding from existing investors Tiger Global, Ribbit Capital and Accel Partners India.

Most recently, Sequoia Capital participated in a $6.25 million investment in fintech startup KredX, which connects credit-worthy SMEs to individual financiers.

Others in the segment include 500Startups-backed Beewise and Times Internet's SmartSpends.