Alok Mittal, former India head of venture capital firm Canaan Partners, has launched a platform for micro and small businesses to provide access to debt financing.
The venture, Indifi Technologies, streamlines credit assessment processes through automated data collection, processing and analysis. It aims to solve credit access issues for small businesses, while providing a zero-operating cost model for lenders.
"MSMEs contribute to nearly 38 per cent of the country's GDP, but at the same time, suffer from USD 380 billion formal debt financing gap. Proliferation of data in this space has created a unique opportunity to address this gap," Mittal said.
Indifi will collect demographic, business and financial data, and analyse it to assist these businesses in securing credit from banks and NBFCs, he added.
"Backed by innovation and technology, we seek to improve access, reduce the overall credit operations cost by 50-60 per cent, and enable disbursements within 4 days from application," he said.
Currently, Indifi is live in three business segments across travel, transportation and eCommerce sectors. The company, which takes a fee for services from lenders, has already onboarded two financial institutions.
It will help SMEs secure loans between Rs 5-50 lakh.
Indifi is backed by venture capital firms Accel Partners and Elevar Equity. Other investors include Former President and CEO of Genpact Pramod Bhasin, Google India Managing Director Rajan Anandan, Gaurav Dalmia, Abhishek Goyal, Gagan Hasteer and Arun Tadanki.
