EXCLUSIVE— Millennial and Gen Z-focused credit card provider Deserve has raised $50 million from the Keystone National Group, funding earmarked for the startup’s expansion of account receivables, the company announced today.
“It’s strictly a debt facility, it has nothing to do with new product launches, but it does allow us to scale,” Kalpesh Kapadia, CEO and founder of Deserve, told Bank Innovation. “[This is] because we could give our users higher credit limits.”
At the moment, Deserve provides three credit cards (specifically designed for the millennial and Generation Z consumer): the Deserve Edu card, Deserve Pro, and Deserve Classic, all powered by Mastercard.
Each come attached with their own rewards structure and credit limits — the Edu card, built for students provides 1% cashback on purchases plus an Amazon Prime Student subscription, for instance — but the average credit limit given to Deserve customers is around $1,200, Kapadia told Bank Innovation.
“Even if you have no credit, you have the ability to pay using your bank information, using [our partnership] with Plaid,” Kapadia said of the Deserve credit system, which uses machine learning and data analytics to approve customers for its cards, which come equipped with accompanying apps on both Android and iOS devices.
The system, while it doesn’t discount those customers with a good FICO score, relies on additional data—such as purchase history—for client approval, Kapadia said. The company also uses machine learning for identity verification, he said.
The debt facility comes after a previous round of funding of $12 million, led by Accel, in October 2017. That funding, raised in a Series C, was used for the launch of Deserve’s credit cards, as well as allowing the company to focus on its target audience of young adults.
The company currently has “tens of thousands of customers,” according to this statement sent to Bank Innovation:
Deserve attracts 15,000-20,000 applications a month and has tens of thousands of customers with over 200,000 applications received and a rapidly growing receivable portfolio with low delinquencies. 2017 saw 3x growth in Deserve’s number of accounts, transactions, receivables etc. and we expect to at least double in 2018.





