The Asian Development Bank’s (ADB) venture capital funding arm has provided seed funding, along with two other investors, for an Indian pension tech start-up striving to provide retirement solutions for millions of informal workers in India and across Asia, Africa and Latin America.
ADB Ventures, which invests in early-stage technology companies globally that address urgent development challenges in emerging Asia and the Pacific, has committed to invest in the New Delhi-based firm pinBox that has developed a micro-pension platform. Venture Catalysts and 9Unicorns are the other two investors that have committed to provide seed funding for the business.
In India, pinBox is working with players such as HDFC Pension, Nippon AMC and SBI AMC to deliver pension schemes, including access to the National Pension System, and insurance products to non-salaried workers.
“Over 1.7 billion self-employed women and youth across Asia, Africa and Latin America are not eligible for formal pension benefits. Even if half of them start saving even a dollar a day for their retirement, we could achieve nearly $10 trillion in new long-term household savings within a decade,” said pinBox co-founder Parul Seth Khanna.
Jugnu Pati, ADB Ventures’ investment specialist, said the firm’s easy-to-used digital platform and its knowledge of financial security pain-points for informal sector workers, especially women, puts it in a unique position to disrupt the sector.
“The funding support will help us upscale our capacity to effectively meet the growing demand for pension inclusion solutions from multiple countries,” said Gautam Bhardwaj, pinBox co-founder.
Published - April 12, 2022 09:04 pm IST
