KreditBee secures funding from Premji Invest, Mirae Asset and Alpine

By Edil Corneille

Bengaluru-based FinTech lending startup KreditBee recently concluded its Series C equity round worth USD 75 Million from Premji Invest, Mirae Asset Naver Asia Growth Fund, Alpine Capital and Arkam Ventures consisting of both primary and secondary investment.

“We started with a dream to help the unserved and underserved segment who have always found it difficult to enter the formal lending sector, either due to lengthy offline processes or traditional underwriting methods. With a larger portfolio of loan products, our objective is to provide credit to over 180 Million New-to-Credit customers who were not provided formal credit earlier. This investment would help us take more positive steps towards achieving that,” mentioned Madhusudan E, Co-Founder & CEO of KreditBee.

The holding entity has previously raised over USD 43 Million cumulatively in equity from marque investors including ICICI Bank and Arkam Ventures.

Registered in March 2016, the group entity also holds Krazybee Services Private Limited – a Systemically important non-deposit taking non-banking financial company (NBFC-ND-SI) registered with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) since May 2017. The group launched its flagship brand KreditBee in May 2018, focused on full-stack digital lending for young professionals. The platform specializes in providing digital personal loans and consumer durable loans to both salaried and self-employed. The company currently has over 1,200 employees and a user base of over 20 million with over 4 million credit customers. The platform plans to diversify its product offering by venturing into digitally-enabled secured loans, home loans and credit line.

Atul Gupta, Partner at Premji Invest mentioned, “We are impressed by the vision of KreditBee to formalize the path towards credit enablement for new-to-credit customers, their skilled team and responsible tech-enabled underwriting, and are pleased to partner with them in their next stage of growth.”

Ashish Dave, CEO at Mirae Asset Venture Investments (India) mentioned, “The large scale at which the platform is able to disburse loans to customers showcases not just the stability and strength of its tech stack, but also a very appropriate credit scoring of customers using alternative data points, which forms a key for new-to-credit customers.”

The Group NBFC Krazybee Services Private Limited qualified as a systemically important non-banking financial company (SI-NBFC) in about two years of operation. The company raises debt from various large-scale and small private sector banks in India, some of which are ICICI Bank, AU Small Finance Bank, Bank of Baroda, HSBC Bank, Catholic Syrian Bank, Jana Bank and Yes Bank. The KreditBee app provides a unified platform where multiple banks and NBFCs provide credit to the customers as direct lending partners. Along with the group NBFC, some other lending partners on KreditBee platform are Fullerton India Credit Company Limited, IIFL, Incred, Vivriti Capital Private Limited, AU Small Finance Bank and Northern Arc Capital Limited.

The company has digitized the entire underwriting process which can be owed to the massive use of AI/ML in the assessment of a user. KreditBee runs each user through multiple policy rules before finally approving a loan for the first-time borrower on the platform. Along with the algorithms, their internally developed five different proprietary scorecards have helped the company to substantially reduce the risk related to a customer.

The current round of fund raise is expected to support the company in its effort to fuel financial inclusion and drive credit uptake in the economy especially for the unserved and underserved segment of the population.