[Funding alert] Y Combinator-backed startup Decentro closes first round

Decentro, an automated API-based platform that enables financial integrations with just a few lines of code and simplifies product development cycles by 10X, has closed its first round of funding. 

Part of the Y Combinator’s summer batch of 2020, Decentro is backed by Plug and Play, an early-stage California-based fund; Upsparks , a Bengaluru-based micro VC firm founded by former co-founders of Solutions Infini (now Kaleyra); and a group of notable angel investors from the Indian and APAC community.

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According to a statement released by the startup, almost every platform or app that needs to interact with banks and legacy institutions faces several challenges related to their product roadmap. Most bank APIs and documentation are poorly structured, old school, and ridden with loopholes and bugs, the statement said. 

“With Decentro, you can sign up as a company/developer on our platform, select your desired banking modules, play in the sandbox, and launch your product or service with those APIs and SDKs within a couple of weeks,” added Rohit Taneja, Founder and CEO, Decentro. 

“This unified approach not only simplifies your product launch but also the subsequent development cycles and upgrades,” Rohit said.

A serial fintech entrepreneur, Rohit co-founded his first venture MyPoolinin 2015 in the social payments space in India. After raising two rounds of funding, Mypoolin was acquired by a California-based global payments player Wibmoin 2017, which in turn was acquired by Naspers-backed PayUin 2019.

As the Director of Engineering for the company, Rohit added that he encountered the same hurdles when leading the India and SEA markets in terms of their payment gateway and banking integrations.

Rohit’s partner Pratik Daudkhane who was previously a venture capitalist at Guild Capital stated,

“We are not just helping fetch consumer data from accounts but are also looking to enable companies for deeper banking transactions and intricate financial services.”

The Bengaluru-based startup launched its product earlier this month and will utilise these funds to spearhead customer acquisition and deepen existing integrations with partner banks. Creating and managing virtual accounts, end-to-end funds reconciliation, and automated money transfers are also some of the initial use cases that Decentro is empowering.

Within a couple of months, Decentro claims to have already onboarded three leading banks in India as its partners and more are in the pipeline.