Tortoise raises funds from Swiggy and ZestMoney founders

By Leandra Monteiro

FinTech start-up Tortoise, a platform that rewards consumers to save up for their purchases, has received an undisclosed amount of funding from Sriharsha Majety co-founder / CEO of Swiggy and Lizzie Chapman, co-founder / CEO of Fintech ZestMoney in a mentors round.

Lizzie Chapman, co-founder of ZestMoney said, “I am elated to be supporting a founder that’s emerging from the ZestMoney family. I wish Nikhil and the team at Tortoise the very best as they take a complementary path to Zest towards making life more affordable for Indians”

The Save Now Buy Later (SNBL) start-up had earlier this year raised around $2.3 million, in a seed round of funding, from Vertex Ventures, a part of global investment firm Temasek.

On the new funding, Vardhan Koshal, co-founder of Tortoise said, “This round is our Mentors Round, where we are raising Angel cheques from category-defining leaders like Lizzie and Sriharsha and expect a few more such visionaries to join in. We are well capitalized from our Seed round, and hence this is less about the investment and more about access to such inspirational leaders.”

Tortoise allows users to save up for large purchases and rewards them for those savings. The savings plan, inspired by Tanishq’s Golden Harvest Scheme, offers weekly and monthly savings plans ranging from a few months to a year.

In this concept, consumers can make small deposits over a few months to a year for a particular product on the Tortoise app and then use those to buy the product with assured cashbacks upto INR 10,000.