Rupaiya Exchange raises $200,000 in funding

Rupaiya Exchange, a peer-to-peer (P2P) lending aggregator, has raised USD 200,000 (about Rs 1.36 crore) in angel funding from a group of high-net-worth individuals (HNIs) and professionals.
The company, which began its operations in November last year, has developed proprietary technology to assess users registered on its platform and perform credit checks on the borrowers.
The information is then shared with lenders which includes banks, non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) and individuals.
"We wanted to partner with investors who shared our vision in making a difference to credit is dissemination in the country. Our endeavour has been and shall be to cater to the population that deserves credit but is struggling because of some reason or the other," Rupaiya Exchange founder Rohan Hazrati said.

The company said it has received loan applications in excess of Rs 70 crore till date and has facilitated disbursement of over Rs 9 crore.
The company aims to scale up disbursement facilitation to Rs 100 crore over the next 12 months.

While the company did not declare the valuation figures, the funds raised will be used to further enhance technology and increasing team strength.
In April this year, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had initiated steps to regulate the nascent and unregulated peer-to-peer (P2P) lending business.
The central bank has proposed registering P2P lending platforms as non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) and had put out a discussion paper on the matter.

A number of online P2P lending companies working as marketplaces bringing individual borrowers and lenders together have come up. These usually work without the intervention of traditional financial institutions like banks and NBFCs.