Uncia raises $3 million led by Pavestone
27 Mar 2026, 12:21 PMThe Chennai-based startup will use the fresh capital to expand its presence across India while simultaneously entering new international markets.
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Uncia, an AI-native lending technology company, has raised $3 million (Rs 25 crore) in a funding round led by venture capital firm Pavestone.
The Chennai-based startup will use the fresh capital to expand its presence across India while simultaneously entering new markets, including the Middle East, North Africa, and North America.
Part of the funds will also support the company's stated goal of pursuing a public listing within the next few years.
Uncia was founded by Hari Padmanabhan, who serves as chairman, and builds digital infrastructure for banks and NBFCs across India.
The company offers three integrated platforms -- UnciaPrime for loan origination, UnciaLeap for loan management, and UnciaFlow for supply chain finance and digital lending. Its AI models were developed over two years in collaboration with IIT Madras, based out of the IITM Technology Research Park, it said.
"We made a deliberate choice to build before we raised. Every rupee we invested came from the conviction that if we solved the right problem well enough, the market would validate it. This funding is not a beginning but a gear shift -- we have the product, we have validation at scale, and now we have the capital to take this to the world," explained Padmanabhan.
Srikanth Tanikella, managing partner at Pavestone, added that while the lending ecosystem is growing fast, most of the underlying technology remains trapped in legacy systems, and Uncia's cloud-first, AI-embedded platform is built to change that.
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