Chennai-based debt marketplace CredAvenue has secured a $137M Series B funding to become the 11th startup in India to reach the unicorn club this year. The round values CredAvenue at $1.3B, up from $410M in September last year, according to the startup.
Fund utilisation
The startup has raised approximately $227M to date, with investors including Sequoia Capital India, Lightspeed Venture Partners, TVS Capital, Lightrock, Vivriti Capital, and Indian fintech CRED. When a company has to raise finance, it faces a slew of obstacles, including uncertainty about interest rates and market evaluation.
CredAvenue wants to use the funds to grow its operations in India and to focus on worldwide markets both organically and inorganically. It intends to acquire a variety of enterprises in order to integrate forward and backward services and products. It will also use the capital to strengthen its technological skills by investing in deep technology advancements, AI, machine learning, and data analytics.
“If you are a company that prefers direct financing, you can visit our loan stack, bond stack, and ABS stack.” If you want indirect funding, you can register on the co-ending platform and bring your retail consumers with you. “Any firm with more than $1.3M in revenue is one of our customers,” he explained.
“Once a partner — whether a lender or a borrower — integrates with us on our operating system, you gain access to everyone on our network.” Our offering is fundamentally about compatibility. We are paving the road for India’s debt market to reach its full potential, and we hope to be a leading participant in global debt markets soon with our distinctive and diverse offerings.”
Founded in 2020 by Gaurav Kumar, CredAvenue acts as a marketplace to connect enterprises to lenders and investors. It also helps businesses and lenders to access primary as well as secondary bonds.
The business ended in FY21 with Rs 47 crore in sales and plans to increase it to Rs 450 crore in the first six months of FY22.
The acquisition
It recently purchased Spocto, a collecting startup with operations in three markets. However, Kumar stated that the business will continue to focus on India in general. “We’ve only just scratched the surface.”
CredAvenue has facilitated loans totaling more than $10.5B to date, according to Kumar. According to him, the platform has around 2,300 corporates, 450 companies, and 750 lenders. The startup intends to use the new cash to expand its operations in India, as well as to acquire companies to fuel its organic growth.
CredAvenue competes with the likes of LOOKCAST, OneDealer, DeepMatter and FlashParking.
“We are pleased about CredAvenue’s value proposition of connecting investors and borrowers through a single-window ecosystem for discovering, facilitating, and tracking debt products.” I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Gaurav for many years, and it’s great to be part of the strong team that is digitising Indian debt markets. Debt in India remains under-penetrated as a percentage of GDP, at 60%. This opens up a huge opportunity for a market leader like CredAvenue,” said Kabir Narang, Founding General Partner at B Capital Group, in a statement.
