The Fintech Trailblazer The company recently raised undisclosed funding with some of the marquee names to invest being Rangarajan Krishnan. Deepak Shahdadpuri, Abhay Hanjura and Vivek Gupta along with Sovereign Fund, Silicon Valley Bank, Robinhood, & Facebook.

Being passionate about helping people access modern finance, Priyanka got her startup idea when she was just 17 while she was shooting a documentary on microfinance in India and across the world. She researched the sustainable delivery of financial services in Honduras, Mexico, Uganda, Bangladesh and India and her thesis was among the first studies on the impact of the Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) system on service delivery in India while she was at Yale University. Upon her return to India, she set up Kite which is Falcon's B2B2C commercial payment vertical that enables entities like banks, neobanks, & vertical SaaS companies to offer innovative commercial payments products to their corporate & SME clients which eventually organically expanded to larger embedded payments and lending platform called Falcon. Priyanka came up with the idea with her best friend and co-founder Prabhtej while they used to carpool to school. From bootstrapping the first part of their journey to working today with the largest banks and networks in the world, Priyanka and Prabhtej have come a long way.

"Falcon is an embedded payment & lending platform that brings the speed and flexibility that enable fintech startups, & BFSI companies to launch the most innovative financial products in days and not months, with an almost zero upfront cost. We've got a unique combination of developer-first APIs & no-code solutions built on top of a highly flexible & scalable modular architecture", commented Priyanka.

Priyanka believes embedded finance has increasingly become commonplace with companies looking to launch multiple financial products within their ecosystems, such as prepaid cards, credit cards, UPI, BNPL, etc. to increase customer retention and revenue. "Before Falcon, to launch any of these payment or lending products, a company would have to integrate directly with multiple banks & legacy systems that took around 9-12 months, millions of dollars, and a whole lot of complexity. As many of our customers would attest, innovation felt like a burden," Priyanka recalls.

"The pandemic has accelerated the business significantly. Since the pandemic has led to an unprecedented increase in digital payments, there is now an urgent need for an issuance platform that can help everyone in the industry to make sense of many instruments and protocols that have come up. Banks and Fintechs / Tech companies alike are realizing that it does not make sense for all of them to integrate directly with legacy systems since banks are low on bandwidth," said Priyanka on the effects of the pandemic.

Priyanka is excited about the space she has created for herself in Fintech, a sector that has been typically dominated by men, especially when she was starting out. The company's commercial payment vertical has seen exponential growth with banks not only in India but globally. The company recently raised undisclosed funding with some of the marquee names to invest being Rangarajan Krishnan. Deepak Shahdadpuri, Abhay Hanjura and Vivek Gupta along with Sovereign Fund, Silicon Valley Bank, Robinhood, & Facebook. Falcon and Kite are en route to process over $3 billion within 12 months. Falcon aims to become the de facto embedded finance platform for the Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa (APMEA) region, targeting $30B in total payments value.

35 per cent of the company's workforce is women as they look to increase it further. The company has achieved more than $2.5 million topline while being bootstrapped as they look set to achieve the target of $3 billion GTV and $30 million topline by 2023.