Pencilton, a teen-focused fintech startup, has announced raising US$ 330K in a pre-seed round led by Jupiter (registered as Amica Financial Technologies). The round also saw participation from many successful founders such as Nilesh Patel and Prashant Singh (Founders of LeadSquared), Ashish Sharma (MD, Innoven Capital), Abhishek Goyal (Founder of Tracxn), Himanshu Sharma (Founder, Aspiring Minds), Kunal Sinha (Founder, GlowRoad), Vignesh Ramanujam (Partner at Spoonfeed) and angel investor Tirumalareddy Karri.
Pencilton offers a first-of-its-kind debit card, PencilCard, to teenagers and students to help them manage their expenses while teaching them the basics of money management. A major upgrade is expected to its debit card in a few weeks that works with the Pencilton app to enable financial inclusion and digital financial literacy for teenagers. With the new funding, Pencilton aims at product enhancement by building industry-leading backend systems for card issuance, management, and further launching of upgraded products. The startup was founded by VishwajitPureti, Ashish Singh, Pallavi Tipparaju, and Viraj Gadde in 2020.
Speaking of the funding, an enthused VishwajitPureti, Co-founder and CEO, Pencilton said, “This round is predominantly of great strategic importance as it serves as a vehicle for us to have some of the best minds from the fintech, as well as the startup ecosystem, join us on our mission. It gives us access to stellar expertise across fintech, fundraising, GTM, user acquisition and more to help navigate the next steps as we scale up.”
“We are incredibly excited for the journey ahead where we are going to announce many industry-leading initiatives that will help bring the best of fintech tools as well as digital financial literacy to teens & students across India,” Vishwajit further added.
Talking about their investment, Rahool Gadkari, Director, Product, Jupiter said, “Jupiter is very excited to invest in Pencilton. The teen/pre-teen banking segment is nascent and growing rapidly. We believe that the Pencilton team understands the space well and is passionately solving both kids’ and parents’ needs. At Jupiter, we will continue to invest or partner with teams which are solving problems adjacent to our own and help make our ecosystem stronger.”