Team Startupcity

·  Seven raises Rs 4 crore in pre-Series A funding led by Venture Catalysts, with support from Vinners and Anchorage Capital.

·  7 Ring, India’s first indigenous contactless payment ring, works without charging, PIN, or smartphone.

·  Funds will be used to scale production and launch 7 Ring Air, targeting 3 million users by 2028.

Mumbai fintech firm Seven, the creator of India's first homegrown contactless payment ring, has raised Rs 4 crore in a pre-Series A funding round headed by Venture Catalysts, among India's top early-stage investment companies and integrated incubators. Existing investor Vinners, a SEBI-registered Category I AIF, also participated in the round, along with Anchorage Capital Partners, supported by the office of the Sheth family promoters of The Great Eastern Shipping Company.

The new capital will be utilized to expand production of Seven's best-selling product, the 7 Ring, and speed the introduction of a lower-priced version 7 Ring Air due out in July to September 2025.

The 7 Ring, RuPay and MasterCard-certified, is a contactless wearable that allows customers to make tap-and-pay transactions using an NFC-enabled prepaid wallet. Conveniently designed, the ring operates without charging, a PIN, or even a smartphone expanding access to digital payments in a mobile-first, biometric-driven environment.

Seven's dream to merge fashion with fintech is perfectly in sync with India becoming a global digital payments giant," said Dr. Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, Co-founder of Venture Catalysts. "With the elimination of charging and smartphone connectivity, the 7 Ring brings safe, seamless transactions to far more people.

Started by Vijay Khubchandani, Mahek Savla, and Karthik Menon, Seven traces its origin in India's fintech and embedded systems innovation ecosystem. The 7 Ring is built from IP68-rated zirconia ceramic and has both point-of-sale (POS) payment acceptance and tap-in transit entry at metro stations. It runs on a dual-revenue model: making 1.08% in interchange charges at POS devices and 0.40% at transit doors.

The firm started gaining public momentum through its appearance on the show Shark Tank India and is now beta-testing support for the National Common Mobility Card (NCMC). It also has plans to include credit card tokenization on its platform. Seven will use the new funds to deploy 3 million rings by 2028 targeting regular metro commuters as well as the fast-growing UPI user base in India.

India's digital payment ecosystem is booming, with industry estimates indicating that the value pool will grow to  Rs 590 trillion by FY29 at a CAGR of around 42%. In FY25 alone, India had 185.8 billion UPI transactions, highlighting the immense potential for new-age payment solutions such as Seven's wearable technology.