Nakad, a fintech company has raised $7 million in its seed funding round from Accel and Matrix Partners India.
AdvantEdge Founders and other prominent startup founders, including Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar (Razorpay), Amrit Acharya and Rahul Sharma (Zetwerk), Nitin Gupta (Uni Cards) and Raghunandan G (Zolve) also participated in this round.
The startup plans to use the funds to grow its presence and grow workforce in technology, product, customer success and business development.
Nakad was founded in 2022 by Ujwal Kalra, Sambhav Jain and Avinash Uttav, It is an intensive supply chain finance startup that provides working capital loans from corporate vendors to small and medium enterprise (SME) suppliers.
“Multiple industries have deep-tier supply chain networks and today’s supply chain financing companies mostly tackle the anchor supplier to the corporations, which now have enough options to cover for their working capital needs. Nakad works on deep-tier supply chain finance, where it caters to supplier of suppliers where the real issue of SME financing lies”, said, Ujwal Kalra, co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Nakad.
The startup leverages its proprietary technology platform, Microbill, which tokenizes invoices from these SMES and helps them in availing working capital loans from banks or non-banking finance companies (NBFCs) against these receipts.
It also seeks to build software layers to help SMEs digitize their billing and reconciliation processes, along with launching several other credit products.
“Credit for MSMEs is a misnomer. B2B supply chain credit today is limited to large enterprises. This is because financial institutions find it extremely hard to access verified information of transactions between original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), tier-1, tier-2 and tier-3 suppliers. We are quite excited to partner with the Nakad team, which has built an amazing technology solution to this problem,” said, Prayank Swaroop, partner at Accel.
“Our thesis is that all supply chains in India are getting digitised with both B2B payments and transaction finance crucial to digital adoption and stickiness. Nakad is addressing a big opportunity in deep-tier supply chain financing. The founders have a unique approach to penetrating large industrial ecosystems with software and then driving formal payments and credit penetration among SMEs”, said, Vikram Vaidyanathan, managing director, Matrix India.
Fintech platform Nakad also expects to expand its customer base in pharmaceuticals, chemicals, auto construction, capital goods and consumer durables in the coming months.
About Nakad
NAKAD is founded by former graduates of IIM Ahmedabad, IIT Bombay and IIT Guwahati who previously worked at BCG, HUL and Oracle. The company is transforming supply chain finance through their tokenization mechanism. This way Anchor’s creditworthiness traverses across supply chain making easy and cheap credit available to MSMEs.