Digital lending platform KreditBee has raised USD 75 million in its Series C round from Indian family office PremjiInvest and South Korea’s Mirae Asset Venture. US-based Alpine Capital and Bengaluru-based early-stage VC Arkam Ventures also participated in the round.
With this round—a mix of primary and secondary share sale—KreditBee’s parent company Finnov has cut down the shareholding of its existing Chinese backers from 40% to 10%. Xiaomi, which has come on board its cap table in October 2017, has exited the company, while Shunwei Capital and Kunlun have reduced their stakes, a report by local media Economic Times said, citing sources.
The company plans to use fresh funds in expanding the borrower base.
“With a larger portfolio of loan products, our objective is to provide credit to over 180 million new-to-credit (NTC) customers who were not provided formal credit earlier,” Madhusudan Ekambaram, co-founder, KreditBee said in a statement. “This investment would help us take more positive steps towards achieving that.”
Incorporated in 2016, Finnov initially started KrazyBee as a micro-lending platform aimed at students, that provided personal loans to finance education fees. Along with Shunwei, Xiaomi led USD 8 million Series A round in KrazyBee in October 2017. By then, the micro-lending startup had acquired an NBFC (non-banking finance corporation) license required to become a lender in India. At that time, it was looking to enter the payday loans segment. Within a year, KreditBee, started targeting working professionals as well.
Ashish Dave, the chief executive at Mirae Asset Venture Investments (India), said KreditBee’s strength lies in its ability to underwrite new loans.
“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,” Dave said in a statement.
Currently, KreditBee offers personal loans and online purchase loans of up to INR 200,000 (USD 2,755) with tenures ranging from two months to 15 months. It reportedly has over 20 million users and is planning to venture into digitally-enabled secured loans and insurance.
Prior to this round, it had also raised USD 43 million in equity from ICICI Bank and Arkam Ventures in its Series B round, the ET report said.
The development comes at a time when digital lending apps have come under fire from the government for alleged collection of personal data and misusing them to threaten and forcefully recover loans. In the wake of this, India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology said that earlier this month Google removed over 100 instant loan apps from its app store.