True Balance, a digital lending and payments startup in India, has secured $28m in Series D funding round to expand its services in the home market.

The funding round was led by the company’s existing backer SoftBank Ventures Asia and Daesung Private Equity.

Existing investor Shinhan Capital also participated in the funding round alongside other investors including Naver and BonAngels.

The latest investment round brings the total amount raised by the company to date to $90m.

In addition to SoftBank Ventures Asia, True Balance’s previous backers include Line Ventures Corporation and D3 Jubilee Partners.

Balance Hero India (BHI), the wholly-owned subsidiary of Balance Hero Korea (BHK), runs and operates the mobile fintech app True Balance.

Founded in 2014, the True Balance app has disbursed loans worth more than INR1bn in India this year.

This represents an eight-fold growth since January 2020 with an average cash loan size of INR1,000-15,000.

True Balance will use the fresh capital to fuel its expansion in India by improving its technology and preparing for its next funding round.

Additionally, the fund will also be used by the company to achieve profitability in the second quarter of 2021.

True Balance founder and CEO Charlie Lee said: “From the day we launched, our focus was on the Next Billion Indian users.

“We will continue focusing on non-online payment users, non-credit score users, people who deserve our help, but need a way to get to it.”

True Balance is also planning to foray into the e-commerce industry and compete with Paytm, Google Pay, PhonePe, among several other wallets and UPI apps in India.

Recently, American fintech startup Truebill raised $17m in a Series C funding round to launch a personal finance management app.

Earlier this month, German fintech company auxmoney secured €500m ($589m) funding to start buying loans on its own online platform.

Tinkoff Bank-backed mobile banking outfit Vivid Money raked in a $17.6m Series A funding round to drive growth.