Slice raising $100 million in first funding after becoming a bank
Slice is raising $100 million in its first funding round since becoming a bank, valuing the fintech-turned-lender at $450-470 million, people familiar with the matter said.
This is less than a third of the roughly $1.5 billion valuation that Slice commanded in 2022.
An extraordinary general meeting notice issued by Slice Small Finance Bank Ltd and reviewed by Mint shows that the lender is seeking shareholder approval to raise ₹485 crore through compulsorily convertible debentures and partly paid equity shares. The proposed fundraise comprises ₹403.47 crore through compulsorily convertible debentures and ₹81.49 crore through partly paid equity shares.
The EGM, scheduled for Friday, names Moore Strategic Ventures, Japan’s Kado Global, Neo entities, Blume Ventures, Raise Fintech, the parent company of stockbroking app Dhan, and PixelSky Capital among the proposed investors. Moore Strategic Ventures is expected to invest ₹106 crore, Kado Global ₹95 crore, Blume Ventures ₹44 crore, Raise Fintech ₹40 crore and PixelSky Capital ₹25 crore.
The round also includes a $5-10 million secondary component, in which existing shareholders sold shares to incoming investors, one of the people cited above said, adding that the round was fully subscribed.
Slice did not respond to emailed request seeking comment.
Slice, founded by Rajan Bajaj in 2016 as SlicePay, began as a buy-now-pay-later platform offering credit lines to students and young professionals.
On October 2023, it announced that it would merge with Guwahati-based North East Small Finance Bank (NESFB). The merger, India’s first between a fintech and a bank, closed on 27 October 2024, and the lender was renamed Slice Small Finance Bank in May 2025.
The deal gave Slice a banking licence but also a troubled lender. NESFB’s capital adequacy ratio—the capital a bank holds against its risk-weighted loans—had slipped to 5.5% in fiscal 2023, far below the 15% the Reserve Bank of India requires of small finance banks. However, this ratio had improved to 18.17% at the end of June.
The turnaround is gathering pace. In the June quarter, total income rose 39% year-on-year to ₹413.8 crore and net profit was ₹50.9 crore against a loss of ₹10.1 crore a year earlier. Gross bad loans fell to 4.36% of advances from 6.31%. Deposits also doubled to ₹5,765 crore, advances grew 56% to ₹5,039 crore, and low-cost current and savings accounts made up 43.9% of deposits.
Fintech’s funding reset
The fundraise comes at a difficult time for consumer fintechs, particularly neobanks, which offer banking services through partner banks without a licence of their own. Fi Money, which raised about $160 million from Peak XV, Ribbit Capital, Temasek and Alpha Wave Global, shut banking services on its app in March after its partnership with Federal Bank ended.
Jupiter secured its own non-banking financial company licence in 2023, allowing it to lend directly. The fintech has raised more than $150 million in private funding since inception. Another neobank, Niyo, has bet on travel money, buying Mumbai-based Kanji Forex in August 2025 and agreeing this week to acquire Capital India Finance’s RemitX forex business for ₹11.4 crore.
Mint reported in April that early-stage fintech investors are moving away from heavily regulated consumer models towards software and infrastructure businesses with little policy risk, after tighter rules on digital lending, first-loss default guarantees and data governance raised compliance costs between 2021 and 2025. Indian fintechs raised $2 billion in the first half of 2026, up 42% from a year earlier, according to Tracxn, though early-stage funding fell 41% to $367 million.
