Fintech Startup Kaleidofin has raised $15 million in its Series B equity round from the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation.
The round also saw participation from Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Seattle-based Strategic Investment Fund, angel investors and existing investors.
The fintech startup plans to use the funds to strengthen customized credit solutions for informal sector customers.
The startup had launched KiScoreTM, a supervised machine learning-based automated credit health checkup for informal sector customers in 2020, which has been used to underwrite over INR 6300 crores (USD 830 million) in credits. It will be based on KiScore model and will offer credit as a platform service for lending to individuals.
Chennai-based Kaleidofin was founded in 2017 by Sucharita Mukherjee and Puneet Gupta, It provides simple, well-designed financial solutions to meet the needs of over 600 million underbanked and unbanked Indians engaged in the informal economy.
The primary focus of the startup’s product range is to dramatically increase the reach and use of formal digital financial services for informal sector customers that can have a transformative impact on customers’ lives.
The fintech startup said it wants to be the first financial services app on these customers’ phones as more and more customers switch to access financial services digitally.
“We are delighted to have investors known for their deep focus on informal sector customers and innovation promoting financial health, as partners. The partnership seeks to offer a broad range of financial services to underserved communities with a specific focus on low-income women customers at scale. The new funds will be used to further strengthen all our product lines, but will specifically help us launch and scale our KaleidoCredit business aimed at offer customised credit products for individuals and nano and micro SME customers”, said, Sucharita Mukherjee, Co-founder and CEO, Kaleidofin.
Through its product lines (KaleidoGoals; KaleidoCredit; KaleidoPay), it has over 1.2 million active transactional customers across India.
The startup has created a local and accessible footprint in 230 districts and 14 states in semi-urban and rural India.
About Kaleidofin
Kaleidofin is a fintech platform that propels under-banked customers towards meeting their real life goals by providing intuitive and tailored financial solutions. “kaleidofin” is inspired by the power of financial solutions to enable beautiful possibilities of a future life for each customer. They believe that everyone deserves and requires access to financial solutions that are intuitive and easy to use, flexible and personalised to real goals that can make financial progress and financial freedom possible for everyone.
They believe financial solutions can provide customers powerful tools that solve their real life goals and challenges.
Kaleidofin will leverage the full India stack, existing networks, analytics, structuring and user-centred design to drive outcomes for customers, in the process, they will also help enrich the digital asset of each such customer.
Their approach is: – To combine distinct financial products (credit, investment, insurance, savings) to form a solution that actually both resonates with and works for the customer – To build customer profiling, underwriting, solution design and machine learning suitability algorithms to solve this gigantic customer problem. – To leverage networks such as agents, cooperatives, self-help groups, temp agencies, MFIs to deliver suitable solutions at enormous scale.
