Mumbai-based neobanking startup Jupiter has acquired EasyPlan, a personal finance startup that was part of Y-Combinator’s 2020 batch, as it looks to grow its user base. The company did not disclose the size of the deal.
This is the second acquisition by Jupiter, which had bought Mitter.io, a private cloud-based chat API platform, almost two years back.
Jupiter was started in 2019 by Jitendra Gupta, who co-founded fintech startup CitrusPay in 2011 and sold it to PayU for USD 130 million five years later. He then served as the managing director of PayU India for three years before leaving it to start Jupiter.
Gupta kept his new venture in a stealth mode and raised USD 24 million in the seed round from Sequoia Capital, MatrixPartners, Beenext, 3One4 Capital, and Tanglin Venture Partners, among others. The fundraising was touted as one of the biggest seed rounds in the Indian startup ecosystem at the time. A year later, in April 2020, Gupta raised another USD 2 million round from Hummingbird Ventures at a valuation of USD 100 million and revealed his neobanking platform. Neobanks are essentially fintech players that partner with conventional banking institutions to build a user-friendly platform over an existing online interface to serve consumers and businesses.
Earlier this month, Jupiter said it had partnered with Axis Bank and Federal Bank and opened up its platform for select customers. The startup now claims to have onboarded over 40,000 customers.
With the acquisition of EasyPlan, Jupiter aims to bolster its savings and investment capabilities as well as expand its user base.
Set up by Manisha Pandita and Sanjay Gandhi in 2017, EasyPlan targets young professionals and enables them to invest in mutual funds in a low-risk manner and claims to have over 250,000 users on its app.
“We were impressed with the customer love that Easyplan has generated, and there was a lot of overlap between our mission and philosophy to drive financial wellness for consumers,” Jitendra Gupta, founder of Jupiter, told local media Economic Times in an interview. “At Jupiter, we’re trying to help people build a more positive relationship with money, and effective saving is an important part of that. We’re excited for Sanjay and Manisha to bring the same customer insight and technology excellence to Jupiter.”
Post the merger, EasyPlan is likely to continue operating as an independent entity. “Easyplan will proceed to function as an unbiased app inside the Jupiter universe,” Gupta said.
Jupiter competes with a slew of neobanks that have sprouted in the country over the past couple of years, such as Niyo, RazorPayX, Yelo, InstantPay, Hylo, and PayZello.