Kunal Shah, Amrish Rau join Sequoia, YC to back teens focused payments app FamPay

Fampay Solutions, a Bengaluru based startup that operates an eponymous three-month old payments app for teenagers and their families, has raised $4.7 million in a seed round from Y Combinator, Venture Highway, Sequoia Capital India and GFC (Global Founders Capital).

Kevin Lin, co-founder of Twitch; Vladimir Tenev, co-founder of Robinhood; Kunal Shah, founder of CRED and Amrish Rau, CEO of Pine Labs participated in this round.

The startup will invest the capital raised to strengthen its engineering team to develop its technology and accelerate growth, it said in a statement.

Founded by IIT Roorkee alumni Kush Taneja and Sambhav Jain, FamPay offers teenagers their first card - FamCard - without the need to set up a bank account. 

The card can be used for all online and in-store purchases. It can also be used for peer-to-peer (P2P) lending and UPI payments. Instead of managing individual expenses, parents can just top up the FamPay account.

“It’s an interesting market to crack because the demands and lifestyle of a teenager are very different and they are not served by anyone yet. We believe that empowering teenagers with their own accounts can create a new network of users and open numerous opportunities in the market,” Jain said.

FamPay is now getting ready to launch its product. The app will be available on both Google PlayStore and the App Store.

The cards will be issued in partnership with IDFC First Bank, the company said. While users can get the virtual card instantly on signing up, the physical cards can be ordered through the app in the following few weeks.

This is the second student-focused fintech startup to have raised venture capital investment this month. This also marks Sequoia India’s and Kunal Shah’s second bet in the same segment this month after having backed student loans financing platform Leap Finance in its $5.5 million fundraise early this month.

The round also saw participation from non-banking finance startup InCred’s founder and CEO Bhupinder Singh. 

The fintech platform provides loans to Indian students pursuing international higher education.

Slice, a payments platform offering solutions to millennials and students, raised $1.4 million in October last year from Shubhrendu Khoche, an executive at payments platform Finablr and Japanese private investment firm Das Capital. In September, Slice had raised $2.9 million from Pegasys Wings Group, jointly owned by Das Capital and Gunosy Capital. In 2018, the company had raised $14.9 million in Series A round from China’s FinUp Finance Technology Group.