14 March 2018, India:
Online lending platform Avail Finance has raised $17.2 million in a Series A funding round. The funding round was led by Matrix Partners. Ola’s co-founders, Bhavish Agarwal and Ankit Bhati; Co-founder of Flipkart, Binny Bansal; Founder of Freecharge, Kunal Shah; Founder and CEO of Mswipe, Manish Patel also participated in the funding round.
Ankush Agarwal, co-founder and CEO of Avail Finance said, “By solving the core of the problem in not having a credit history, using advanced technology, data sciences and artificial intelligence, we are bringing a new approach to an age-old problem. The huge chunk of people in the urban mass who are currently being ignored by the formal lending sector will stand to benefit from Avail’s solutions.”
Vikram Vaidyanathan, managing director, Matrix India, “Consumer lending to the blue-collared workforce is a large, untapped and hard to solve opportunity. We are impressed by Avail’s differentiated sourcing and underwriting strategy, and are privileged to partner with Ankush and Tushar on their journey. We believe it’s still early days of the India fin-tech story and will continue to invest in the space.”
Avail Finance was founded by Ankush Aggarwal and Tushar Mehndiratta in February 2017. It works on B2B2C model. It focuses on blue-collar workers.
(Image – Avail Finance)