KreditBee concludes $75 mn funding round from Premji Invest, others

The fintech lending firm's objective is to provide credit to over 180 million new-to-credit customers who were not provided formal credit earlier

Fintech lending startup KreditBee has concluded its Series C equity round worth  $75 million from Premji Invest, the investment arm of Wipro billionaire Azim Premji. The other investors included Mirae Asset Naver Asia Growth Fund, Alpine Capital and Arkam Ventures. The round consisted of both primary and secondary investment.
 

The current round of fundraising is expected to support the Bengaluru-based company in its effort to fuel financial inclusion and drive credit uptake in the economy, especially for the unserved and underserved segment of the population.
 

“We started with a dream to help the unserved and underserved segment,” said Madhusudan E, co-founder and CEO of KreditBee. “With a larger portfolio of loan products, our objective is to provide credit to over 180 million new-to-credit customers who were not provided formal credit earlier. This investment would help us take more positive steps towards achieving that," he said.
 

The holding entity had previously raised over $43 million cumulatively in equity from marque investors including ICICI Bank and Arkam Ventures. The group entity also holds Krazybee Services Private Limited - a non-deposit taking non-banking financial company registered with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) since May 2017. The group launched its flagship brand KreditBee in May 2018, focused on full-stack digital lending for young professionals.
 

The platform specialises in providing digital personal loans and consumer durable loans to both salaried and self-employed. The loan amount disbursed can go as high as Rs 2 lakh while the tenures range from two months to 15 months.
 

The company currently has over 1200 employees and a user base of over 20 million with over 4 million credit customers. The platform plans to diversify its product offering by venturing into digitally-enabled secured loans, home loans and credit line.

 “We are impressed by the vision of KreditBee to formalize the path towards credit enablement for new-to-credit customers, their skilled team and responsible tech-enabled underwriting,” said Atul Gupta, partner at Premji Invest.
 

The company has digitized the entire underwriting process which can be owed to the massive use of AI and machine learning in the assessment of a user.
 

“The large scale at which the platform is able to disburse loans to customers showcases not just the stability and strength of its tech stack, but also a very appropriate credit scoring of customers using alternative data points, ” said Ashish Dave, CEO at Mirae Asset Venture Investments (India).