Despite tighter regulatory scrutiny and compliance pressures, India’s fintech ecosystem continued to attract investor interest and expand into new areas, highlighting the sector’s resilience and innovation momentum
This month’s “Five Fintech Startups To Watch” edition spotlights emerging players such as Neoble, Frex, Kalpi, Spense and iCReDS, which are building across high-growth fintech segments and shaping the next phase of the ecosystem
From credit and payments to embedded finance and wealthtech, the featured startups reflect how Indian fintechs are evolving beyond scale-driven growth towards specialised, technology-led and compliance-first business models
It was an action-packed month for the fintech sector. Lending tech startup Kissht made a bumper listing on the bourses, while InCred Holdings filed its updated DRHP for a ₹1,250 Cr IPO.
On the regulatory front, the RBI kept its grip firm on the fintech ecosystem, cancelling Paytm Payments Bank’s licence and proposing a one-hour cooling-off period for UPI and IMPS transfers above ₹10,000.
Simultaneously, controversies continued to dog the ecosystem. Bengaluru police reportedly registered FIRs against fintech firms MobiKwik and Lendbox in connection with alleged cheating of investors and misuse of funds via their P2P lending platform, Mobikwik Xtra.
Meanwhile, Rishi Gupta, who is being probed in a GST evasion case, also stepped down as the MD and CEO of Fino Payments Bank.
However, the challenges and compliance pressure did not stop the capital inflow into the sector. Scapia’s ₹600 Cr fundraise and Novio’s ₹100 Cr Series A round point towards the fact that investors are still writing large cheques.
Besides, homegrown fintechs continued to roll out new offerings and chart new frontiers. Pine Labs plans to launch infrastructure for stablecoin-backed prepaid cards, while Paytm said that it would invest around ₹100 Cr in its European subsidiary.
Against this backdrop, we are back with the monthly edition of “Five Fintech Startups To Watch”. This edition of the series spotlights names like Neoble, Frex, Kalpi, Spense and iCReDS, operating in some of the most promising and fast-evolving corners of India’s fintech ecosystem.
With that said, here are the fintech startups that caught our attention in May.
Editor’s Note: The list below is not a ranking of any kind. Startups have been listed alphabetically.
India receives more remittances than any other country, over $125 Bn annually, yet the experience of actually sending money home remains broken. Most NRIs sending money from the US or Europe still contend with transfers that take 2-5 business days, opaque fee structures, and forex markups of 1-5% baked silently into the exchange rate.
Founded by Aditya Varma, Himanshu Arora and Nikhil Shanker, Gurugram-based Frex was born directly from this frustration. Rather than routing transfers through the traditional correspondent banking network, Frex combines blockchain-based rails with local banking integrations to move money across borders in near real-time at better-than-mid-market FX rates and zero fees.
Frex uses stablecoin or digital asset infrastructure as the settlement layer between the sending and receiving countries. The result is a settlement path that skips multiple intermediary nodes, cuts settlement time from days to minutes, and makes the pricing fully transparent to the user.
The startup raised ₹9.5 Cr in a pre-seed round co-led by Zeropearl VC and White Venture Capital, with angel participation from CRED’s Kunal Shah, Urban Company’s Abhiraj Singh Bhal and Varun Khaitan, and Uber’s Pradeep Parameswaran.
Since its launch in November 2025, Frex has seen rapid early adoption and is targeting $1 Mn in monthly transfer volume within its first few months. It competes with Wise and Remitly, but its bet is an Indian-built, diaspora-first product with local institutional knowledge.
Frex operates in the global digital remittance market, projected to become a $60 Bn opportunity by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 16.7% from 2025 to 2030.
India’s health insurance ecosystem processed over ₹1.17 Lakh Cr in premiums in FY25, covering more than 58 Cr lives. But when a hospital treats a patient under Ayushman Bharat or any other insurance scheme, the approved claim doesn’t translate into cash for anywhere between 45 and 270 days.
In the gap between approval and payment, hospitals borrow working capital from informal sources at an interest rate of 18% to 30% per annum. At any given time, an estimated ₹38,000 Cr in approved claims sits as trapped working capital across some 29,000 hospitals, most of which lack access to competitive formal credit.
This is the problem iCReDS is solving.
Founded in 2026 by Nikhil Kurian, the startup’s premise is that the cost of healthcare financing in India can be brought down from 20% to 8%, not through subsidies or regulatory mandates, but by connecting lenders to the verified claims data that NHCX, India’s government-built health claims exchange, already produces every day.
Approved claims are confirmed payment obligations with fixed amounts and set settlement dates. iCReDS wants to make them act like it, turning them into real-time working capital within 24 hours rather than months.
The startup is pre-product and pre-funding, currently engaging hospitals, insurers, financiers, and policymakers.
Quantitative investing, which is building portfolios driven by rules, factors and data rather than gut instinct, has consistently outperformed discretionary stock-picking at the institutional level.
But the infrastructure required to do it properly has historically cost ₹1-₹2 Cr to build and required a dedicated quant team to run. That puts it firmly out of reach for retail investors and smaller asset managers.
Founded in 2025 by BITS Pilani alumnus and former quantitative researcher Ashwar Gupta, Hyderabad-based Kalpi runs two products targeting different ends of this market.
Kalpi.ai is a no-code platform for retail investors that lets them build rule-based stock baskets, backtest those strategies against historical data, and execute them directly through broker integrations, without writing a single line of code.
While KalpiQuant.com is the institutional layer, offering PMS firms, AIFs, RIAs, and family offices access to over 300 pre-computed investment factors, an institutional backtesting engine, and portfolio optimisation and risk attribution tools.
Rather than recommending stocks, the platform lets users or fund managers define a systematic strategy, for example, “buy the top 20 stocks by revenue growth and low debt-to-equity ratio, rebalance monthly”, then test that strategy across years of historical market data before deploying it live.
The platform allows users to go from idea to backtest in minutes, with AI and ML features layered on top for strategy insights without requiring a dedicated quant team.
Kalpi recently raised ₹3.75 Cr in a seed round from Rainmatter Capital, the investment arm of Zerodha, backed by the thesis that good systematic investing tools in India have largely remained locked inside large institutions. The investment market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 21% between 2025 and 2030.
India has over 5 Cr mutual fund folios and millions more holding shares, bonds and insurance policies. But when investors need liquidity in a pinch, most people still end up taking expensive personal loans or breaking their investments at inopportune times.
Mumbai-based Neoble is trying to fix this by operating as a digital NBFC that provides instant secured loans against mutual funds, shares, bonds and insurance policies. Neoble claims borrowers can get up to ₹5 Cr against their mutual funds. Its stack is capable of processing the application process in eight minutes and transferring funds into the seeker’s account within four hours.
The business model sits on the spread between the cost of funds and lending rates, with interest-only repayment options making it lower friction than traditional EMI-based products.
Founded in 2023 by Jayaprakash Sinha, Neoble has raised $174K across three rounds from investors, including PointOne Capital and Acies Ventures. The startup operates in the country’s MSME-focused embedded NBFC sector, which is expected to grow at a CAGR of 16 to 20% in the next few years.
India has over 10 Cr credit card users, yet issuing a secured credit card against a fixed deposit still takes most banks weeks and loads of paperwork. This is because the infrastructure to do it faster simply doesn’t exist at most institutions.
Bengaluru-based Spense is trying to fix this by operating as a full-stack infrastructure provider for regulated financial entities, enabling banks and fintechs to issue secured credit cards, prepaid instruments, and forex products while ensuring regulatory compliance, auditability, and integration with legacy systems.
Founded by Pawan Kumar and Srinivas Krishnamurthy in 2023, Spense sits between a bank’s legacy stack and the end product. The platform handles complex regulatory requirements and system integrations, enabling banks and financial institutions to launch new credit offerings without having to rebuild from scratch.
Spense raised $1.85 Mn in a pre-seed round led by GrowthCap Ventures, with angel participation from CRED’s Kunal Shah, The Math Company’s Sayandeb Banerjee, Suresh Rayasam of Google, and Ravi Sudhakar of Microsoft.
Operating in the country’s banking-as-a-service market, projected to grow from $1.14 Bn in 2022 to $4.43 Bn by 2030, the startup is integrated with multiple regulated entities and is onboarding more banks. It is also endeavouring to expand beyond secured credit cards into prepaid and forex use cases.
Edited by Shishir Parasher
With inputs from Akshit Pushkarna, Venu Rathore
Source: Inc42 - Startups
