The idea for Instarem came from a bachelor party. In 2013 Prajit Nanu needed to send money overseas to help pay for a friend's celebration, and the transfer was slow and expensive. He saw, in his words, a huge gap in the cost efficiency of cross-border remittance. And he decided to build his own fix.
He had come to this from sales. Before Instarem he held sales roles at the outsourcing firms TMF Group and WNS Global Services. Crunchbase lists the University of Mumbai as his university.
Vertex Ventures, which had been there from the Series A, stayed and supported the company.
He started the business from his apartment with a colleague, Michael Bermingham, who became chief operating officer. Founded in 2014, it took until 2015 to go live. When the first payment went through that year, the company had three employees and an outsourced technology team. The name was a contraction: instant remittance.
Tiny seed rounds followed. In January 2015 came US$500,000 from Global Founders Capital, then US$5 million for a Series A in 2016 with Vertex Ventures among the backers. Those small cheques mattered later.
The worst moment came in early 2020. When the pandemic hit, investors backed out of a funding round. Vertex Ventures, which had been there from the Series A, stayed and supported the company. Nanu has also talked about the pull of family, recalling his daughter sitting on his lap during a client call when she fell ill. Balancing work and home, he has said, is a continuing challenge.
The company survived and changed shape. In 2019 it rebranded as Nium, turning a consumer remittance app into infrastructure that banks and businesses build on. In July 2021 a US$200 million Series D made it a unicorn, with a valuation put at about US$2 billion by early 2022.
Then came the cost. Nium cut about 10 percent of staff in October 2023 and lost several senior executives that year. A planned US listing slid from 2025 to the end of 2026, which Nanu tied to strengthening the leadership team. In 2024 the Brunei Investment Agency led a US$50 million Series E.
For a founder, the lesson is the size of the trigger. Nothing grand: one irritating transfer, a spare room, three people. What counted was who stayed when the money left.