Bangalore-based neobank, Walrus has raised an undisclosed amount of funding for its platform focused on providing banking solutions for teens and young adults. The pre-seed funding round was led by Better Capital, an early backer of neobanks in India including investments in Open, Khatabook, Jupiter, Yelo and Slice.

There was also participation from angel investors including Raveen Sastry (Co-founder, Myntra), Raghunandan G (Ex-Founder and CEO of TaxiForSure) and Brijesh Thakkar among others.

Founded in 2019 by Bhagaban Behera (CEO), Sriharsha Setty (CTO) and Nakul Kelkar (COO), Walrus was set up with an aim to help teenagers and young adults develop financial literacy at an early age.

"Financial literacy is an important aspect of life which most people learn very late in life. In India, we usually learn the importance of these life skills in our early or late 30s by which time most of us have already made a lot of financial mistakes. We allow parents to educate and financially support their children in their first steps using a digital financial product," Behera said.

Teenagers do not need to open a bank account to use Walrus. They need to install the app, load money and pay any merchant via UPI QR code or using the Debit Card for e-commerce purchases. Speaking of the investment, lead investor Vaibhav Domkundwar said in a statement, "We have 200 million such teenagers who will experience money & money management in a new way with Walrus."

Walrus is also building a community known as 'Club Walrus' which is a teens-only network for networking and learning things like entrepreneurship, building products, digital marketing etc. from Industry experts.

Although the startup is in beta, it is witnessing a strong demand for its product from teenagers and is seeing a high engagement and retention amongst its beta users.