Early Salary raises Rs 100cr from Eight Roads Ventures, others

EarlySalary.Com, a fintech startup that offers personal loans, today said it has raised Rs 100 crore in latest round of funding led by Eight Roads Ventures India.

Existing investors, IDG Ventures India, Dewan Housing Finance Corp Ltd (DHFL), and seed investor Ashok Agarwal also participated in the series B round.

In May last year, Early Salary had raised USD 4 million (Rs 27 crore) from IDG Ventures India and DHFL. In total, it has raised USD 20.5 million till date.

"We will use the funding to accelerate our growth. By end of the year, we are aiming at 100,000 loan disbursements per month (from about 14,000 loans a month now)," Early Salary co-founder and CEO Akshay Mehrotra told PTI.
 

He added that the company is witnessing strong traction from cities like Bengaluru and Pune as well as smaller cities like Mysore.

Early Salary offers cash loans for a tenure ranging from 7 days up to 30 days and for amounts of Rs 8,000 to Rs 2 lakh.

"We have been able to offer access to short-term loans to young working professionals, who don't have a credit bureau rating. We use social algorithm and artificial machine intelligence for risk assessment. Deploying machine learning has helped us in faster loans approvals," he explained.

Mehrotra said the funds will be used to further improve the technology stack and work on improving machine learning systems for better, faster and more prudent risk management.

Besides, the company is also looking at building additional products and tenure options to customers.

Mehrotra said the company also expects to be profitable by the end of the year.

"The key to our success will be helping more and more people without any human interface. Right now, we are about 70 per cent automated and we want to take this to 90-95 per cent," he added.

As a part of the transaction, Dhyanesh Shah, Principal at Eight Roads Ventures, will join the board of EarlySalary.

"The company has cleverly leveraged data and technology to provide instant affordable loans to an otherwise excluded customer segment. We look forward to working closely with Akshay, Ashish and the management team at Early Salary," Shah said.