Fintech business Tortoise has acquired an unknown sum of money from Lizzie Chapman, co-founder, and CEO of ZestMoney, and Sriharsha Majety, co-founder and CEO of Swiggy.
What is a Tortoise?
Tortoise is a platform with a mission to encourage users to save for purchases and has raised an undisclosed amount of funds in a mentors’ round.
Co-founder of ZestMoney Lizzie Chapman expressed her delight at supporting a startup that is deriving from the ZestMoney clan.
I send my best wishes to Nikhil and the Tortoise team as they pursue a complementary strategy to Zest to help Indians live more affordably.
Earlier this year, Vertex Ventures, a division of the large international investment company Temasek, contributed about $2.3 million in a seed round of funding to the Save Now Buy Later (SNBL) venture.
The firm receives two founders as investors in the current investment, which is a continuation of the seed capital investment and is referred to as a “mentor round” in order to assist Tortoise to build a strategy for speedier expansion. Nikhil Joy, a former vice president of Zest Money, joined the startup as a co-founder of the Tortoise team.
Founder’s words
Vardhan Koshal, a co-founder of Tortoise, commented on the new fundraising, saying, “This round would be our Mentors Round, in which we are collecting Angel cheques from category-defining luminaries like Lizzie and Sriharsha and hope a few more such visionaries to join in. Due to our strong financial position from our Seed round, this is less about the money and more about getting access to such inspiring leaders”.
The company was founded in 2020 by Ex Strategic Consultant to FamPay Vardhan Koshal and Surya Harsha Nunnaguppala. Nikhil Joy, a former vice president at ZestMoney, just joined the team as a co-founder of Tortoise. At the consumer loan company until recently, Joy, a fintech product leader, was in charge of advancing products and growth.
The fintech startup, Tortoise encourages consumers to save for significant purchases and rewards individuals for doing so. The savings strategy, which was modeled after Tanishq’s Golden Harvest Scheme, provides weekly and monthly savings programs with observed to vary from a few months to a year.
According to this concept, customers can make tiny deposits for a certain product over the course of several months to a year on the Tortoise app, and then utilize those deposits to buy the goods with guaranteed cashback rewards of up to 10,000 INR.
How is Tortoise different from other Fintech Startups?
Tortoise, unlike other consumer-focused fintech businesses, is a B2B2C platform that both assists businesses and merchants in improving sales. Tortoise provides businesses with an all-in-one way to offer their clients discounts that not only increase sales but also encourage return business.
SNBL is becoming more significant not just in India but also across western markets like the US and UK.
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