Perfios acquires open finance platform Fego.ai

New Delhi: Bengaluru-based fintech firm Perfios has acquired Chennai-based open finance platform Fego.ai, two people aware of the development told Mint.

The discussions started during Global Fintech Fest 2023 in Mumbai recently. The deal was closed this week.

While the deal amount is not yet known, this is more like an “acqui-hire”, said a second person aware of the development. As a part of the agreement, Fego’s 30-member team is joining Perfios. Fego co-founder S. Kumar Srivatsan will lead the product and business unit, while S. Kumar Srikanthan, the other co-founder, will be part of the strategy team.

Earlier, Fego was in acquisition talks with M2P Fintech, but the deal fell through at the last moment for reasons best known to the two entities, the person added. “With limited runway and after M2P pulled out, this is not really a great transaction.”

Responding to Mint’s query earlier last week, Srivatsan confirmed the development without revealing further details.

Established in 2020, Fego offers an open-finance product stack to developers, with its application programming interface (APIs) enabling companies to connect users’ financial accounts, enrich customer experience and understand financial behaviour of its users for use-cases across lending, know-your-customer, collections and wealth.

In December 2021, Fego raised $1.5 million in seed capital from 3one4 Capital, Saison Capital, First Cheque, Eximius Ventures, Speciale Invest and some angel investors like Cred founder Kunal Shah, former BharatPe CEO Suhail Sameer, BharatPe co-founder Shashvat Nakrani, Groww CEO Lalit Keshre, M2P Fintech founders Madhusudhanan R. and Prabhu Rangarajan, and Koo co-founder Aprameya Radhakrishna.

"We constantly evaluate inorganic opportunities to meet our growth aspirations and some deals do not go through due to variety of reasons and Fego was one such deal. The Fego team has built a great product and given the red hot data/account aggregator space in India, I’m sure they will do well," said Madhusudhanan.

Perfios, which offers financial and data analysis software and tools, besides lending solutions for small and medium businesses, recently raised a $229 million Series D round led by Kedaara Capital. It plans to expand in its footprint in North America as well as Europe. The funding round valued Perfios at $900 million, and included some secondary sale.

A press note shared by Fego said, "Fego joins the Perfios family. Kumar Srivatsan and Kumar Srikanthan will take up product and strategy roles and continue building at Perfios to enable the growth of digital finance in India and across the world."

Ramgopal Subramani, chief strategy officer, Perfios, said, “Both Kumar Srivatsan and Kumar Srikanthan have been pioneering some exciting work on open-finance in India and we are glad to have the team at Perfios. I wish them the very best, as they join us in our exciting journey.”