We are excited to lead the seed round of Maximize Money, partnering with Shiva and Siddhanth as they build India's universal savings and loyalty infrastructure.

India's consumption story is approaching an inflection point. As GDP per capita climbs toward the $3.5-4k range, a new wave of retail aspiration is taking shape. Under-penetrated markets are coming online, and billions in value will begin to flow between digital buyers and the brands eager to serve them.

‍But India's shoppers have always treated savings like a sport.

The trouble is the hunt itself. Coupon sites, gift-card stores, scratch-card cashbacks, and card-specific perks all live in separate apps or worse, hidden screens at checkout. Consumers toggle, copy, paste, pray. Merchants watch north of ₹35 billion in gift-card and affiliate sales trickle through a tangle of pipes. One for coupons, another for bank offers, and then some for closed-loop wallets. None of these pipes connect, so data breaks and users bounce mid-checkout. Meanwhile UPI now carries 80% of India's digital payments yet captures barely 10% of rewards traffic, because its near-zero fees leave no margin to fund old-school cashbacks.
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Value still flows, but it's stuck in the wrong channels. That fragmentation is both pain and opportunity. We believe the moment is ripe for a single, horizontal savings layer that automates the stack and lets value-hungry customers win every time. 

That conviction led us to partner with Maximize Money in its seed round.
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Unlocking the Consumer Savings Layer

Maximize's SaveMax engine lives directly inside checkout. It sweeps live coupons, buys discounted gift cards on the fly, weighs real-time card or UPI incentives, and even checks whether loyalty points would yield a bigger delta. All before surfacing one 'Best Price' in three taps. A ₹5,000 pair of shoes becomes ₹3,900 once a brand coupon, a bank offer, a gift-card spread, and affiliate cashback are stacked together, with the user lifting a finger only once.

Early usage validates the pull: Maximize has crossed 150,000+ users who have transacted for more than ₹160 Cr with 1,000+ brands live, powered entirely by word-of-mouth across web and mobile. Just as important, the business model earns a healthy blended take-rate from gift-card spread, affiliate commissions, and high-margin loyalty redemptions, translating savings for users into durable gross margin for the platform.

Building India's First Mass Loyalty Currency

Saving money is only half the game. The other half is what shoppers earn back, and here the system is just as broken. Indians collect points they cannot use or never earn at all. Value sits scattered across bank and card programs, merchant wallets, and travel schemes, each locked behind its own walls. Points expire, devalue, or refuse to move. And the richest rewards, the airline miles and hotel nights that actually change how you travel, stay reserved for the top 1% who hold premium credit cards.

Maximize's answer is MaxCoins, a single loyalty currency that behaves the way money should. Every coupon, gift card, affiliate purchase, and payment earns MaxCoins at the moment of checkout, across 100,000+ merchants and fully compatible with UPI, debit, and prepaid. No premium card required. One MaxCoin is worth at least one rupee, and far more when it moves.

MaxCoins transfer into airline and hotel programs at scale. 50,000 MaxCoins become 50,000 Qatar Avios, which book a Delhi to Sydney business-class seat worth ₹2.5 lakh. A multiplier of roughly 5x, unlocked by the same award-chart arbitrage that frequent-flyer obsessives have quietly exploited for years. The economics works because empty seats and unsold rooms cost airlines and hotels almost nothing. Occupancy is never 100%, so partners turn idle inventory into real demand while users turn small everyday savings into outsized value. The earliest transfer partners already span IndiGo, Air India, Accor, ITC Hotels, and Marriott Bonvoy.

The strategic point is bigger than any single redemption. Savings make a user transact once. A currency makes them come back. By converting scattered discounts into Max Coins that can be earned, saved, spent, and redeemed in a single loop, Maximize moves from a checkout tool to a loyalty network with its own interoperable value. Retention compounds, redemptions carry the highest margin in the stack, and the currency itself becomes the moat.

It is not a hypothetical. Rakuten paired with Amex Membership Rewards drives over $1B in annual GMV. HeyMax built $100M in GMV simply by replacing cashback with miles. Both scaled from under 100,000 users. Maximize already sits past 1.5x that base, and it is bringing airline-grade rewards economics to the payment rail a billion Indians use every day.

 Built by Rewards Natives

Co-founders Shiva Mehta (ex-Twid, PineLabs) and Siddhanth Jaini (ex-Mastercard, Razorpay) have spent a decade deep in payments rails, merchant integrations, and loyalty economics. They’ve negotiated thousands of merchant links, scaled loyalty programs to national reach, and personally own 28+ credit cards and hacked their way to 40-plus countries on points - exactly the kind of obsession this space demands.

 Partnering for India's Value-First Decade

India is entering its biggest consumption wave yet, but the national psyche around 'paise ki kadar' won't fade; it will compound. As affiliate, gift-card, and loyalty GMV race toward projected doubles by FY-29, a horizontal savings and loyalty OS becomes inevitable.

Maximize Money is positioned to be that operating system. Abstracting complexity for shoppers, unlocking incremental conversions for merchants, and finally bringing rewards to the rail a billion people use every day.
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We're proud to back Shiva, Siddhanth, and the entire Maximize team as they turn scattered discounts into a single, effortless click, and scattered points into a currency that finally moves, redefining what value means for the Indian consumers.

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Kalaari Capital is an early-stage, technology-focused venture capital firm based in Bengaluru, India. Since 2006, Kalaari has empowered visionary entrepreneurs building unique solutions that reshape the way Indians live, work, consume and transact. The firm's ethos is to partner early with founders and work with them to navigate the inevitable challenges of fostering ideas into successful businesses. At its core, Kalaari believes in building long-term relationships based on trust, transparency, authenticity, and respect.

If you are a founder building an early-stage company, write to us at pitch@kalaari.com.

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