Mumbai-based small business loan provider, Fundfina has raised $1.3 Million as a part of its seed round from LetsVenture AIF Syndicate led by Pratekk Agarwaal (Investor and Ex-CBO- BharatPe), Telama Investment, NAFA Capital, and Hem Angels.
The company has also witnessed participation from its existing investors.
Earlier in Jan 2020, Fundfina raised over $0.3m (INR 2 Crores) from a clutch of an angel and institutional investors including Sanjay Agarwal (Founder of Athena Capital), Birendra Agarwal (CIO Close Brothers FTSE 250 Merchant Bank), Bhavin Zaveri (Director TCS), Rajesh Chaubey (Senior Engineer Saipem), Abhishek Yadav (Director Tata Power), and grants from impact investors such Inclusive50 (IFC & WorldBank), Bharat Inclusion Initiatives (CIIE by IIMA) and United Nations Development Programme.
Fundfina, founded by Rahul Tripathy, Nishant Bhaskar, Bikram Bajaj & Abhijit Naik, in 2019 empowers small businesses to grow, manage and protect cash-flows. The company enables brands & institutions to grow and retain their distribution network over an open and trusted embedded financial marketplace.
Proceedings of the current round would be used for accelerating Fundfina’s vision of building the best open marketplace bank for institutions to serve MSME financing needs.
This will be done by scaling up the marketplace participants and throughput of the key products of patent-pending financial inclusion indices and unsecured working capital while introducing new products such as B2B checkout, MSME credit cards, small business insurance, and micro-savings.
In addition to accelerating the business sales and operations, the funds will be used in equal proportion for technology & analytics, acquisitions cost for supplies of monies, and also on compliance infrastructure.
Currently, Fundifina has about 600,000 micro and small businesses across 26 Indian states with 80% being new to formal credit. Along with this, the company also counts big marquee clients such as Unity, ICICI, LivFin, Aphelion, IndiTrade, Emerald, and 30+ brands & digital enterprises such as Eko, Pay1, Masterpay, MyDukaan, and SmartDukaan including others.
Commenting on the fundraise, Pratekk Agarwaal, Lead Investor & Ex-CBO BharatPe said, “FundFina has the potential to become No 1 go to national brand for MSME cash-flow based lending (Embedded Financing) on back of tremendous momentum and several top worldwide fintech awards over the last 18 months with their proprietary MSME focused underwriting models and the founding team that has built banks and platforms, huge underserved opportunities in India & other emerging markets and robust data & platform play through IP in indices and technology.”
“Cash flow-based lending is to be the basis of the next phase of credit adoption. The team has the inherent capability to develop products that integrate( and potentially transform) with the ecosystem with key tech moats. It is the start of an exciting journey in a very large addressable market,” Tejas Subramanian from Telama Investment said.
Speaking on the funding, Rahul Tripathy, Co-founder, and CEO of Fundfina said, “Democratizing finance for small businesses is the raison d’être for Fundfina. Our B2B2B working capital solutions power a huge retailer base of leading payment firms, banking correspondents, and kiranatech while providing our lending partners indices driven approach to investing in the MSME credit portfolio. With the recent round of funding, we will accelerate the scaling of our API first open financing platform”.