Decentro bought Neowise in its first acquisition to automate loan collections

Decentro builds API infrastructure that connects Indian businesses to banks for payments and lending workflows.

Owning a working loan-collections suite — bought rather than built — lets Decentro offer banks and NBFCs the full arc from lending API to repayment.

Decentro was founded in 2020 by Pratik Daudkhane and Rohit Taneja; in 2022 it raised a $4.7M Series A to hire across business development, product, operations and tech, and to launch new product categories.

On July 19, 2023, Decentro acquired Mumbai-based Neowise Technologies — founded in 2020 by Rohit Ramachandran and Siddarth Padmanabhan, offering credit solutions and debt-collection services — for an undisclosed amount in cash and shares, its first acquisition since inception. It took over Neowise's debt-collection dashboard, planned to integrate the payments and lending workflows, and entered debt collections as a service for banks and NBFCs. Neowise operates as a fully owned subsidiary with both teams continuing independently.

Loan collections for Indian NBFCs and lenders relied heavily on manual operations — an automation gap right beside Decentro's lending APIs.

This was Decentro's first acquisition since its 2020 inception: it chose to buy a working collections suite and team instead of building one.

The cash-and-share structure with Neowise as a wholly owned, independently run subsidiary keeps founder teams in place and integration risk low.

Vertical API fintechs eventually hit the unglamorous workflow next door — collections. Buying a working suite and its team is faster than persuading banks to trust a homegrown dashboard.

As of the July 19, 2023 announcement, Neowise operated as Decentro's fully owned subsidiary with the two teams continuing independently while Decentro integrated the payments and lending workflows and folded the debt-collection dashboard into its offering for banks and NBFCs. Taneja said Neowise's collections suite 'seamlessly aligns' with the company's vision of empowering the lending sector. Inc42's own tally put India at over 4,200 active fintech startups, more than 660 of them funded, with $14.8B invested between 2021 and H1 2023 despite the funding crunch.