Embedded finance startup Buildd raises $2 million led by Picus and Mankekar Family Office
- ByStartupStory | May 23, 2022
Picus Capital, a German-based early-stage venture capital firm, and the Mankekar Family Office have invested $2 million in Buildd, a Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform.
Ranjeet Singh (Co-founder, Pratilipi), Kunal Sharma (ex-Freecharge), Nitin Agarwal (Founder, B21), Aniruddha Patwardhan (Engineering Head, PhonePe), and Kedar Swadi are among the startup’s backers (Data Science Head, Phonepe).
Buildd, founded in 2020 by former banker and entrepreneur Sachin Gaikwad, provides banks and technology platforms, particularly fintech, direct-to-consumer (D2C) e-commerce platforms, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies, and corporates, with an embedded finance infrastructure stack to help them launch financial products and services.
Sachin’s second business endeavour is Buildd.in. The banker-turned-entrepreneur began his career with HSBC Bank, where he served as Vice President of Corporate Banking for over 12 years until launching his trade finance platform, Financial Quotient, in 2012. The company specialises in business analytics for the trade finance industry.
Sachin met Patanjali Somayaji and Amit Bhor, who were developing the personal money management app Walnut at the time when it was acquired by a financial institution in 2013. Sachin saw the startup’s potential right away and decided to join the team as the chief strategy and business development officer. Capital Float NBFC bought Walnut in 2018, and the two teams amalgamated. Sachin had been examining a big ‘communication’ gap in the fintech business all along, which led to Buildd, his next startup.
Typically, banks struggle to conceptualise high-frequency financial products based on alternative data, such as those created by new-age computing platforms. Core banking systems require middleware to communicate with such businesses, necessitating the creation of an intermediate layer to connect them.
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