[Funding alert] Fintech startup FinBox raises $15 mn in Series A round

B2B credit infrastructure fintech Startup FinBox has raised $15 million in its Series A funding round led by A91 Partners, with participation from Aditya Birla Ventures and Flipkart Ventures.

The startup plans to use the funds to grow its offerings and expand into Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

The startup also announced that it will double its current workforce to power its expansion.

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Through this funding, it will enable the company to disburse loans worth over Rs 20,000 crore by 2023 and launch fintech startups in several parts of Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

The Bengaluru-based Finbox was founded in 2015 by Rajat Deshpande, Anant Deshpande, Nikhil Bhawsinka, and Srijan Nagar, It is a B2B credit risk management platform with proprietary data connectors that helps in lending to self-employed merchants, non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) and new-to-credit customers.

The fintech company counts ZestMoney, KhataBook, TrueBalance, Home Credit India, IIFL, large conglomerates, telcos, banks, NBFCs and other Fortune India 500 companies among its clients.

“The future of financial services lies in every company and brand providing a curated set of offerings to their own users in their own platforms and ecosystems. This not only improves trust but also the velocity of transactions and helps users get the financial products they want, wherever they want them. We enable that by allowing any company, including fintechs, banks, and conglomerates, to offer 100 percent digital products within a matter of days”, said,Rajat Deshpande, Co-founder and CEO, FinBox.

He said the company aims to take the complexity out of financial services and make it easier to create and launch new, more effective products without the hard work.

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In the past 12 months, the company has seen its monthly revenue grow by over 700 percent, even as its credit facility GMV has grown more than 80 times since the launch of its embedded finance platform in January 2021 . Through this funding, the company aims to empower over 10 million SMEs through formal lending through its flagship partnerships with 50+ banks, NBFCs and fintechs.

“Our data products, including our proprietary scores, create an instant trust between lenders and millions of borrowers, thus enabling us and our lender partners to create automated yet low-risk lending workflows for deeper financial inclusion. We realised early that responsible use of alternate data for underwriting can be a game-changer for lenders in India, where less than 50 percent of credit eligible population is able to prove its creditworthiness and access credit”, said, Anant Deshpande, Co-founder and head of data products, FinBox.

"Financial services are moving out of the physical premises into the palms of the users. This requires credit and underlying value chains to be reimagined and built from the ground up for a digital-first era. FinBox is the most prominent credit infrastructure player in the region and we back the team to lead this transformation. FinBox is well placed to become the leading infrastructure player for banking-as-a-service internationally too”, said, Kaushik Anand, Partner, A91 Partners.

About Finbox

FinBox makes it seamless for any business to provide tailored credit products to their customers & partners. They absorb all the complexity from lending enabling their partners to launch in a week. They are building a state-of-the-art credit infrastructure that makes business easy and allows companies to focus on building the business while they take care of the credit.

At FinBox, they have developed cutting-edge products such as Device Connect that power millions of credit assessments a month through our proprietary alternative credit scoring algorithm.