Junio has announced to raise $3 million for a kids-focused digital smart card in the seed round. This digital smart card helps children to make digital and physical purchases easily. These fundraising rounds are backed by marquee institutional investors along with angel investors. These funds would be utilized for enhancing the company’s product development and customer acquisition initiatives.
In September 2020, the former Paytm alumni Shankar Nath and Ankit Gera introduced Junio. The concept behind Junio is to digitize pocket money for children between 4th and 10th classes to understand the financial discipline and knowledge in them at the time of teenage.
Ankit Gera, (co-founder, Junio) said that Junio acts as a digital smart card and allows children to make a digital and physical purchase. Their goal is to create a community of financially well-known and empowered young generation. The main target is to deploy two lakh smart cards pan India by the end of 2021.
In addition to the immediate transfer of pocket money, the app also permits parents to keeps a track of how much money their children spend and allows parents to create in-app daily tasks for their child and tie them with perks. The app is integrated with characteristics such as setting up withdrawal limits for ATM and gives flexibility to parents to cancel the card at any time using the app. Dib Chaudhuri, a Singapore-based serial entrepreneur, and angel investor said that Kids focuses on fintech is a new concept in India and a space that is not explored. Here, what is most impressive are Junio’s methods to meet the requirements of the millennials who are inclined towards the digital world, online shopping using their parent’s debit/credit card. The new-age fintech startup aims to know financial literacy among children and empowers them to grow into financially independent adults.
Junio’s services and products are mainly focusing on children, this space is in a nascent stage in India. The fintech company had to compete with Sequoia-backed FamPay. The Bengaluru-based firm launched in early 2019, had raised $4.7million in a seed funding round from Y-Combinator, Sequoia India, and Global Founders Capital.
