Fintech Kasheesh wants financially strained customers to say “bye” to BNPL – TechCrunch

Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) products have become incredibly popular with users, and both startups and tech giants like Apple have noticed. But BNPL companies have also attracted some controversy to encourage people who are less financially secure to take on debt without fully explaining the associated risks.

Kasheesh, a fintech startup that is less than two years old, came out of stealth today with a product the founders say can benefit consumers by offering flexibility similar to BNPL, but without taking out a loan. The company’s main product is a browser extension that allows customers who shop online to share their payments on multiple combinations of debit, credit and gift cards without having to pay fees or interest, co-founder and CEO Sam Miller told TechCrunch.

“You use your existing credit and your existing debit to actually simplify the transaction instead of going through a credit line and taking out a loan that you do not fully understand and then buying the same item and owing money over six to 12 months,” Miller said.

The platform itself was launched in private beta mode in January and has already raised over $ 10 million in user transactions and purchases, according to the company. Miller added that this number has consistently doubled every month since its launch.

Kasheesh targets two main types of customers, Miller said. The first group is the “pay-as-you-go” consumer who uses the platform as a budget tool to avoid overdrawing the cards or over-utilizing the credit. The other bucket, he added, is the customer who “has 10 credit cards and wants[s] each card should be top of the wallet. “These customers can also use Kasheesh to share purchases with friends, for example. Miller said the company has not gone after these users on purpose yet, because even though the technology supports shared purchases, the company is still so early that it has not built the capacity of the customer support team to handle requests from many people for a single transaction.

In addition to the public launch, Kasheesh also announced that it has raised $ 5.5 million in start-up funding from institutional and celebrity angel investors. VC firms Tribe Capital, Anthemis and Courtside Ventures participated in the round along with NFL player Odell Beckham Jr., investor Sahil Bloom and actor Robin Wright.

The company is able to offer its product to users free of charge because it makes money on brokerage fees from MasterCard, which helps Kasheesh issue a one-time card on behalf of users to complete each purchase. The one-time card, Miller explained, subtracts from the customer’s desired sources of financing and allows the customer to choose how much money to spend from each source when making the purchase. For MasterCard, he added, the value proposition makes more sense than BNPL, because Kasheesh’s average order value per customer is “well over $ 1,800” compared to average BNPL purchases, which tend to be much smaller.

Sam Miller, Kasheesh co-founder and CEO. Photo credit: Kasheesh

Finally, Kasheesh plans to develop its technology so that users can use the same card across multiple transactions instead of having to generate a new one-time card each time, Miller said. Miller also plans to expand the Kasheesh team, currently 12 people, by recruiting heavily for product and customer success roles.

The company says it is also focused on security and keeping customer information confidential. Kasheesh works with Stripe and Plaid to process transactions, so the company does not store credit card information on its own servers, co-founder and CTO Kevin Kim told TechCrunch.

“We are big believers in the anonymous component of transactions. I compare it in a way to the day when there was always one person in the grocery store line who had to write a check when they were to check out from the grocery store, and that’s the stigma that came with it. “That’s why we do not do it, we do not pick cherries. Everyone is looked at exactly the same – it does not matter what geographical location, demographic information, what cards you connect, none of that matters to us,” said the CEO. Miller to.

While Kasheesh serves many of the same consumers as BNPL would do, Miller is confident that the product is differentiated enough to stand out.

“We see the whole fintech world as a giant competition,” Miller said. “I think that alternative cash financing is the category we fall into, and that includes BNPL, which includes traditional forms of payment such as credit and debit, it includes crypto, but. I think we have no direct competition in terms of who does exactly what we do… But I think there will be a huge wave where consumers are looking for a little more power and transparency at the point of purchase. “