Digital Micro-Lending Platform SMECorner has raised around $7 million ( Rs. 47.5 crores) from NBFC Capital First Ltd and a clutch of investors including Accion Ventures.
The capital raised is a mix of debt and equity with 25 crores in debt and Rs. 22.5 crore in equity. Post the investment, Capital First will own a 14.2% stake in SMECorner.
As informed by the NBFC in its stock exchange filing, the deal is aimed at sealing a partnership with Digikredit for loan orientation. It is backed by Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC and private equity firm Warburg Pincus.
SMECorner which helps SME’s to access loans from banks will be using the capital to scale its loan book by expanding to offline branches and honing its platform.
Samir Bhatia, founder and chief executive at SMECorner said,
We want to grow our loan book to about Rs 400 crore by (the end of)FY19 and to Rs 1,500-2,000 crore by FY20. This partnership will help us achieve that scale even as we are in talks with a few B2B platforms to enable loans for their participant vendors thus helping us scale our customer base too.
Moreover, a part of the fund will also be utilised by the company in strengthening its credit-worth analysis tools including Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tool, that analyses data on paper and crunches cash flows immediately.
Capital First is backed by Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC and private equity firm Warburg Pincus.