Rubique raises $3M in bridge round from Kalaari Capital and others

On Wednesday, financial marketplace for individuals and SMEs Rubique announced having raised a bridge round of $3 million from existing investor Kalaari Capital and Udayan Goyal, Managing Partner at Apis Partners, a private equity firm focused on Africa and South Asia.

This development comes after the company announced its intention to raise $10–15 million in a Series B round last year.

The company will be leveraging these funds to make even greater inroads across India by strengthening the technology product through rich data science methodologies as well as exploring new product territories in insurance and mutual funds.

In April last year, the firm had raised $3 million in Series A from Kalaari Capital, YourNest Angel Fund, Globevestor, and Dexter Angel Circle.

Commenting on making the funding a discreet affair, Manavjeet Singh, CEO, Rubique, said,

“We deferred our Series B round since the company was already generating sufficient revenue worth Rs 2 crore a month for the last six months without huge marketing spends. We feel funding is overrated and instead of looking at it as breaking news or survival fund, we focus on basics like revenue generation, self-sustainability, and acceptability of our model in the ecosystem.”

However, the company decided to go ahead with the new round as there was immense inbound interest.

Being a financial marketplace, Rubique has various bank products under the categories of credit cards, consumer loans, SME loans, and insurances.

In an earlier interview, Rubique had stated that it generates its revenue from banks. While the basis points vary according to the products, the average basis is from 70 to 150.

Moreover, the recently launched Rubique Advantage feature, new lending solution TAB, and insurance products have enabled the platform to disburse more than Rs 1,500 crore worth of loans across 27 cities. Of this, Rs 250 crore was disbursed in the last two months alone, according to the company. Rubique is now looking to expand its team of data scientists as well.

There is a plethora of loan marketplaces in the country, some of the known ones being BankBazaar and LendingKart, which have high verticalisation. Then for the SME segment there are players like Capital Float.