Bengaluru, India-based Leap Finance, a fintech startup that offers loans to Indian students planning to study in the US, on Tuesday raised $5.5 in a seed funding round led by Sequoia India with participation from a few angel investors including Bhupinder Singh of InCred and Kunal Shah from Cred.
Leap Finance in a statement shared that the company will utilise the funds to hire for technology and capital markets teams in Bengaluru and San Francisco.
The online platform of Leap Finance enables Indian students who are planning to study in the US opt for loans whithout any collateral at interest rates which starts as low as 8 percent.
Vaibhav Singh, co-founder, Leap Finance in a statement said,
“Indian students make up for 25% of a class in many top graduate programs in the US…Yet, the education loans they avail of are at interest rates twice as high as their American peers, which we aim to bring down,”
Arnav Kumar, co-founder, Leap Finance shared the cornerstone of Leap Finance as the support to the next generation by enabling theme with a promising solution,
“We want to be backers of the next generation of promising students, irrespective of their family background or means,”
“A competitive financing product is the first offering and sets the base for our larger vision to become a cross-border neobank,” he added.
Ashish Agrawal, Principal, Sequoia Capital India appreciated Leap Finance on its market-fit idea and mission-driven team,
“This attractiveness of the market, strong founder-market fit, and Leap’s mission-driven team is what led to our belief in an early partnership with them,”
About Leap Finance
Started by Vaibhav Singh and Arnav Kumar in 2019, Leap Finance aims to ease down the education loan accumulation process and suppress the interest rates for the students considering it as the very need of the hour for Indian students aiming to study in the US. The company currently supports over 150 US schools and aiming to back over 1,000 students this year.
Singh previously worked financial services companies for over a decade’s period including Deutsche Bank, Capital Float and InCred. For Kumar, Leap Finance is the second founding company after GoZoomo, a used-car marketplace.
