INTERVIEW: Don’t want to get distracted with the unicorn status, says Jupiter’s Jitendra Gupta

• Jupiter is currently among the highest valued Indian startups outside of the unicorn club.
• The platform is in the third year of its operation and was working as an invite-only preposition till 2021.
• It would be crossing its first million users by next week, the company’s CEO Jitendra Gupta said.

After being valued at a whopping $710 million last December, neobanking startup Jupiter wants to stay away from the hustle of becoming a unicorn – startups valued above $1 billion – this year at least.

Jupiter’s founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Jitendra Gupta told Business Insider that the firm doesn't want to raise any capital in the next 12 months at least as Jupiter still has been able to spend the capital since its inception in 2019.

“We are pretty comfortable from a cash position standpoint. We have at least a four to five year runway with us. So from that side we are pretty comfortable and we don’t want to distract ourselves by just getting into this whale external validation. So we have enough cash, we know our strategy, what we want to do, so we just want to stay focused heads down in the queue for the next 24 months. And then finally worry about all these other stuff,” Gupta noted.

Jupiter is a digital banking startup that allows customers to set up their savings bank account with in-built money management features such as real-time spend insights, tracking liquid assets across bank accounts, personalised savings goals and managing transactions.

The three-year-old startup is now looking to get aggressively into the lending and wealth management space in order to offer a wider array of offerings for its customers. It claims to add over 150,000 users on its platform on a monthly basis and wants to stay put at that number for now and focus on building better offerings, instead of aggressively scaling the platform even further.

Gupta also noted that Jupiter would be crossing its first million users by next week. It had initially expected to hit this target by June 2022.

The company, in the first two years of its operations, focused on an invite-only offering which helped it to build a better buzz around the brand. The company opened up its platform for all users in October 2021.

According to business intelligence platform Crunchbase, Jupiter has raised a little over $150 million to date. It counts Mirae Asset Venture Investment, Sequoia Capital India, Matrix Partners India, Rocket Internet Japan-based MUFG Bank and Tiger Global Management as its investors.

Jupiter is currently among the highest valued Indian startups outside of the unicorn club.

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