Drona Pay raises Rs 3.2 crore seed round as fraud prevention gains

Fintech startup Drona Pay has raised a seed round of INR 3.2 crores from Varanium Capital, Credit Saison, fintech veterans including Kunal Shah, Jitendra Gupta, Amrish Rau and a clutch of other investors.

Drona Pay delivers real time protection using machine learning & proprietary data sets, to defend institutions against ever increasing frauds in payments & lending. It protects BNPL, UPI, credit card & debit card transactions from frauds, scams, collusion and delinquency.

As UPI transactions continue to reach new peaks, 4.2 billion transactions in October 2021, the rise of digital payments has also increased focus by fraudsters on this space. Even RBI is looking keenly at this space with the announcement of the fourth cohort of the regulatory sandbox focused on prevention and mitigation of financial frauds.

Founded by Satish Kashyap, Pallavi Narvekar and Sukhdev Sinh Zala, the three have worked together at the National Stock Exchange Group and have significant experience in building risk and analytics solutions. Satish Kashyap is CEO of Drona Pay and was previously Chief Operating Officer of National Stock Exchange’s technology business (NSEIT) and was Director with SunGard / FIS.

“While we initially saw the savings for BNPL from delinquency reduction, we were impressed with the team’s ability to reduce merchant fraud & chargebacks for payment providers, which convinced us of the huge potential & teams capabilities,” said Aparajit Bhandarkar, Partner, Varanium Capital who led the round. Leveraging machine learning and proprietary data sets, to minimize delinquency and bust-offs is key to profitability for BNPL & retail lending FinTech Apps.

“With increasing digital adoption, fraud management for real time transactions has become a massive problem for banks and Fintech companies. We were very impressed with team’s first principle thinking on creating the product ground up and saving millions of dollars for businesses and consumers,” said Jitendra Gupta, Founder and CEO of Jupiter, who also participated in the round.

The seed round will help expand the technical and product team as Drona Pay is witnessing increased traction from FinTechs and banks in India. “We aim to use the funds to strengthen the offering and increase penetration into Indian Banks and FinTechs, who are undergoing a transformation. The array of new products launched by Indian FinTechs and Banks will need robust real time risk scoring abilities which are provided by Drona Pay,” said Satish Kashyap, Co-founder & CEO of Drona Pay.

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