CredAvenue, a Chennai-based fintech startup, has secured $90 million in Series A funding backed by Sequoia Capital. Lightspeed, TVS Capital Funds, Lightrock, CRED co-founder Kunal Shah, and Stride Ventures were among the other investors who participated in the round.
This is the largest Series A investment in the history of the Indian startup ecosystem. Ola Electric, led by Bhavish Aggarwal, has earlier raised $58 million in a Series A round in 2019. The company is valued at around $410 million as a result of the equity funding. CredAvenue appointed Avendus Capital as its exclusive financial advisor on the transaction.
CredAvenue plans to use the latest funding to strengthen its product capabilities and improve its technology and data science infrastructure. The company proposes to invest aggressively in data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence within the next few months in order to significantly upgrade and expand its product offerings across all its core platforms. The startup further expects to go from an assistance platform to a fully self-serve platform, which will increase the efficiency and autonomy of platform users.
Gaurav Kumar, founder and CEO of CredAvenue commented on the funding round saying, “Our objective is to revolutionize the debt market through technology and innovation. We are the only enterprise debt platform offering all forms of debt, both in India and globally and this reflects in the scale of business done by our platform since inception.”
CredAvenue, founded in 2017 by Gaurav Kumar, is a debt platform that connects businesses with lenders and investors. The company isn’t an NBFC, thus it can’t lend capital to individuals on its own. The startup has five platforms for distinct types of needs for both borrowers and investors which include CredLoan, CredCoLend, CredPool, CredSCF, and Plutus. Besides all these platforms, the fintech startup provides portfolio monitoring and management services to its clients as a SaaS solution.
CredAvenue’s debt platform provides lending institutions and businesses with discovering and implementation services for a broad range of products. So far, the platform has handled transactions totalling almost $9 billion, including over 1,500 institutional borrowers, 750 investors, and 1 million end-retail borrowers involved.
CredAvenue, which has been on a hyper-growth momentum for the last year, now employs over 350 employees working across many verticals such as technology, sales, marketing, strategy, and human resources. By the end of FY22, it seeks to have doubled its workforce to 700 individuals. The company also intends to expand globally and grow inorganically through strategic acquisitions.
The company has successfully established market leadership across various debt categories, including co-lending, loans, and bonds, by streamlining access and servicing and allowing consumers to easily explore different options through a single interface.