BNPL fintechs slice up India credit market: Slice becomes unicorn  

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intech startup Slice has become a unicorn after a $220m Series B funding round, demonstrating the growing power of buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) companies in India.  

Slice was founded in 2016. It’s part of India’s burgeoning BNPL industry. Since the launch, the company has positioned itself as an alternative to traditional Indian banks and credit companies.  

Slice provides a number of credit cards predominantly targeting millennials and younger consumers. The cards enable Slice’s five million registered users to split their bills into three interest-free monthly instalments. The company has boasted that it is growing its users by about 200,000 new customer registrations each month.  

Slice will use the Series B round money to scale the business, with founder and CEO Rajan Bajaj telling Reuters that most of the money “will not be used for burning”.  

While Slice has hinted that it may soon launch new cards, the company’s main focus is to launch its services on the state-backed inter-bank money transfer system, Unified Payments Interface (UPI).  

“What we are doing for cards today we are also going to do for consumer payments,” Bajaj said.   

Google-backed PhonePe and Ant-backed Paytm, which recently raised $2.46bn via India’s biggest-ever initial public offering, already offer UPI-based payments.