17 October 2017, India:
Bengaluru-based microlending platform KrazyBee has raised $8 Million Series A equity and debt financing led by Xiaomi Technologies and Shunwei Capital. The round also saw participation from E-city Ventures and RK Group.
KrazyBee plans to utilize the fresh funds for improving its technology platform so that it can expand its services across more cities and also lend more from its own books.
“We have raised two rounds prior to this, the seed round was in June last year when we raised $2 million and we also raised a pre-series A of $3 million where Plum Ventures was the lead investor,” said Madhusudan E, co-founder of KrazyBee. “We have two major products, one is the product financing, which we do in partnership with major e-commerce websites, and the second is a pay-day loan product which we do for professionals and students from degree colleges,” he added.
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Commenting on the Series A round, Xiaomi Technologies Investment Director Shirley Mao said, “The Indian demography has a large population of urban young adults that spend a lot online & offline. For such an enormous ecosystem, the need for urgent personal finance for purchase requirements is highly underserved. An appropriate focus towards tech-based credit evaluation and compliant sourcing of funds can help capture and penetrate this market big time.”
KrazyBee is currently operational in close to 800 colleges in Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, Mysore, Vellore, Coimbatore, Nagpur, Nashik and Manipal. The company claims that it currently has more than three lakh registered users, of which over 50,000 active confirmed users regularly use the platform. Recently in the month of June, the microlending platform received a non-banking financial corporation (NBFC) license from the RBI.
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