Ankush Agarwal founded Fintech startup Avail Finances in 2017. It aims to provide loans to blue-collar workers through partnerships with big companies like Ola, Swiggy, Ecom Express. Recently it raised a funding of $11.5 million Series B round led by Falcon Edge. Matrix Partners that funded the company previously also took part in the round.
The vision of Avail Finances
The company managed to raise $9 million from Matrix partners in 2nd round of equity funding in 2019. The platform slowly but steadily wants to expand its portfolio to digital banking and at the same time, keep providing loans.
Ankush said, “Our initial experience in lending helped us learn that we need to step back and create a product suite so that our customer can live their entire lives on Avail. Hence, we are creating a virtual banking solution for them.”
It often gets difficult for blue-collar workers to get small loans. And therefore, the platform fills a void that existed in the market. Ankush even said that they wouldn’t charge any fee for a month:
“We will be extending loans of Rs 3,000 or Rs 5,000 to start with and give them a period of one month to repay without any extra cost. If they like the service, borrowers will be offered an option to leave a tip while repaying the loan,”.
Future scope and targets of the company
Avail Finances has solid goals for the future. Since it was founded in 2017, it has disbursed over 250 crores in loans to over a million customers. It now wants to increase the disbursements to around 3000 crores in one year.
In an interview with Ankush in January 2020, he said, “The potential is huge in India. Our objective is to reach out to all the ‘missing middle’ urban poor who are neither served by traditional financial institutions nor by microfinance companies. In the next 18 months, we plan to achieve cumulative loan disbursements of $450 million”.
The company is focusing on using technology to improve the whole loan experience. The founder said:
“Our objective is to leverage technology to speed up the loan approval process, eliminate the need for physical verification and provide alternate data points to score the applicants that do not have a formal credit score,”
Well, we can see the company is going in the right direction. This is evident from the recent fundings it has received. Let’s see how smooth the loan taking experience gets with time.
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