India’s Finarkein Analytics raises $4.75m in Pre-Series A funding

By Gloria Methri

Pune-based Finarkein Analytics has raised $4.75 million in a Pre-Series A round led by Nexus Venture Partners. The round also saw participation from existing investors IIFL’s Fintech Fund, Eximius Ventures and angels like Uni’s Nitin Gupta and Ashika Group’s Chirag Jain.

Finarkein’s data and workflow orchestration platform allows enterprises to co-create data products on India’s emerging digital public infrastructure (DPI), such as the account aggregator (AA) ecosystem, ONDC-Financial Services, OCEN and more. Over the last 18 months, Finarkein’s platform has enabled over 50 enterprises to publish and consume data on DPIs.

Nikhil Kurhe, Co-founder and CEO of Finarkein said, “India’s approach to digital infrastructure has been unique, wherein a lot of value is directly passed onto end consumers. DPIs like the account aggregator are only accelerating this, and at Finarkein, we’re glad to be a part of this movement from day zero and scale it further. Finarkein’s trusted data products will play a significant role in unleashing the potential of DPIs in India and beyond.”

India needs its financial services sector to grow multifold to become a $7 trillion economy by 2030. DPIs like the account aggregator ecosystem, UPI, ONDC, and OCEN will be key to driving down the costs of financial services in India while accelerating innovation and distribution. Their vision is to enable every financial journey in India to become an AA-native journey in the next three years.

Anand Datta, Partner, Nexus Venture Partners, said, “I have been following the account aggregator space fairly early and came across Nikhil and team Finarkein as winners of the AA hackathon back in 2020. They have only since doubled down on the space, and we have seen Finarkein single-handedly scale this vertical and build a new category from the ground up. At Nexus, we partner with extraordinary entrepreneurs to build category-defining companies, and in Finarkein, we see just that: India’s first and leading data and DPI infra company.”

Finarkein was conceptualized in 2019 in response to the RBI Master circular outlining the account aggregator framework and how it would democratize access to financial data for regulated entities. India’s financial services ecosystem must reinvent itself in a post-DPI world.

Being a part of multiple teams that have built India’s DPIs at conceptual stages, combined with domain expertise in building highly performant scalable data platforms, has allowed Finarkein to drive over half of all pan-India AA volumes today.