Avail finance, an online lending platform based in Bengaluru recently raised $17.2 Mn in a Series A funding round led by Matrix Partners which comprises of both debt and equity.
This round of funding also saw the participation of Bhavish Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati, Ola’s co-founders; Binny Bansal, co-founder & CEO of Flipkart; Kunal Shah, founder of Freecharge; and Manish Patel, founder, and CEO of Mswipe.
“Consumer lending to the blue-collared workforce is a large, untapped and hard to solve opportunity. We are impressed by Avail’s differentiated sourcing and underwriting strategy and are privileged to partner with Ankush and Tushar on their journey. We believe it’s still early days of the India Fintech story and will continue to invest in the space”, said Vikram Vaidyanathan, Managing Director, Matrix India.
A year ago, Avail Finance also received a $200,000 funding in a round led by Bhavish Aggarwal.
Ankush Aggarwal and Tushar Mehndiratta founded the online lending company in February 2017. Avail Finance is dedicated to catering India’s blue-collared workforce for they are usually overlooked by organized lending institutions. Due to low credit card availability and the absence of a properly structured credit history, these manual labors who represent a large section of the Indian population turn to informal sources at high-interest rates to receive credit.
By leveraging alternate digital data and the power of India stack (Aadhaar, eKYC, UPI), Avail Finance provide loans between INR 5,000-60,000 as personal loans at a monthly interest rate of 1.2-2%.
Founder of Avail Finance stated, “By solving for the core of the problem is not having a credit history, using advanced technology, data sciences and artificial intelligence, we are bringing a new approach to an age-old problem.”
As for investor Matrix Partners India, they are currently investing a massive amount of money in the Indian technological market. They have already invested colossal sums in startups like DocTalk, Gobasco, CreditVidya, LoadShare, TestBook and more. The equity investment firm was also a participant in the Treebo Hotels’ $34 Mn Series C funding round back in August 2017.
The market projections in the global consumer and SME loan market is forecasted to surpass the $3 Tn over the next ten years due to government initiatives to provide problem-free and digital financial transactions. The online financial marketplace industry is also predicted to reach a market value of $2.3 Bn by 2020.