[Funding alert] Neobank Juno raises $3M in seed from Sequoia's Surge, Polychain Capital, others

Bengaluru-based Juno, a cross-border neobank that provides customers an FDIC Insured High Yield Checking Account, on Friday officially announced that it has raised a seed round of $3 million from Sequoia Capital's Surge Program, Polychain Capital and Dragonfly Capital Partners. 

The round also saw participation from investors such as Consensys Labs, Astarc Ventures, Singapore Angel Network and notable angels including Balaji S. Srinivasan (Ex-CTO, Coinbase and General Partner, a16z), Salil Deshpande (ex-MD, Bain Capital Ventures), Amrish Rau and Jitendra Gupta (CEO & MD, PayU India), Nitin Sharma from Incrypt, Venu Palaparthi (CCO, Dash Financial), Rajesh Chelapurath (President, Ceera Investments), Brian Ma (Founder, Divvy Homes), Sanjay Mehta from Mehta Ventures, and Prashant Malik (Creator of Apache Cassandra).

Varun Deshpande, Co-founder of Juno, said,

“With these marquee investors onboard, we are now well capitalised to launch Juno in the US and onboard initial customers with our High Yield Checking Account."

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"We are currently in the process of finalising our partner bank and launching in private beta. Once finalised, we will be able to create checking accounts for customers with our partner bank, initiate ACH transfers, issue debit cards and start providing you with ways to save more," added Varun.

Juno was founded in July 2019 by Varun Deshpande, Ratnesh Ray and Siddharth Verma, who also created the Consensys-backed Nuo protocol in 2018. The trio had earlier founded BeeWise, an alternate credit analytics platform acquired in 2017 by Aditya Birla Money.

Juno said its goal is to completely phase out the use of Savings Account by building a powerful High Yield Checking Account which can help save more with direct deposits, free cash withdrawals and no fees. 

“Our mission with Juno is to help create an open financial system for the world by providing equal opportunity and access, no matter where you are born or how much you earn,” said Varun.

(Edited by Kanishk Singh)