Series yAy!

March 25th 2015

We are very excited to announce that we just raised $500,000 from Accion Venture Lab and Rianta Capital Zurich’s Artha Initiative.

From our early days, working out of our unassuming rooftop office at HSR Layout, to being deployed in 350 locations across 24 states in India, we have come a long way. We started Artoo with the vision to improve quality of lives of the poor by improving access to financial services. Our solution is unlocking a huge opportunity for lending institutions, allowing them to improve customer experience, to scale deeper by offering tailored financial products and to lend to a segment with undocumented, volatile income all while reducing risk.

Over the years, we have realized that one of hardest things about selling enterprise software to a ‘first time’ technology user is to ensure that they adopt it. At Artoo, we constantly strive to listen and learn from our users and use these insights in our product design. Today, we have more than 1,900 users, most of whom have never used a smartphone or have had limited exposure to the internet.

This funding marks the start of the next phase of our journey — a stronger and a more ambitious Artoo. In this next phase we look to enhance our product functionality, build our team and scale operations globally.

We are excited to have Accion onboard. Their network and understanding of new age financial services will be extremely valuable as we look to expand internationally, build more data centric tools and create personalized financial products in a space which is providing limited or no options.

We are grateful to all our customers for taking a chance on us at this early stage and trusting us with their core business operations. They pushed us to levels we didn’t think we were capable of. Villgro, who incubated and seed funded us and more importantly mentored us through the highs and lows. And finally our families and friends who have stood by us in spite of multiple cancelled holidays, dates, lunches/dinners and working weekends. Here’s to the next 5 years!

- Sameer, Indus, Kavita, Shubham, Kaushik, Akhila, Dilip, Shrivatsa, Shameer, Sowmya, Jagan

Read more about our fundraise here: Economic Times, The Tech Portal, VC Circle, Yourstory