CreditVidya raises $3 M in funding led by Bharat Innovation Fund

With the new capital, CreditVidya plans to expand its credit underwriting services to companies in various sectors that are looking to extend credit facilities to their customers

Fintech platform CreditVidya raised funding of $3 million in a round led by Bharat Innovation Fund, with participation from the founding members of Falcon Edge Capital - Ryan Khoury, Navroz D.Udwadia and Rick Gerson.

This is an extension of its $5 million Series B round, which was raised in September 2017 led by Matrix Partners. With the new capital, it plans to expand its credit underwriting services to companies in various sectors that are looking to extend credit facilities to their customers.

Abhishek Agarwal, CEO and Co-founder of CreditVidya, says,

“Fintech today is going to drive monetisation, and credit is going to be the underlying factor that determines this shift. With more organisations looking to give financing options and seeking NBFC licensing, underwriting is going to be important. With our existing capabilities, companies can look at different underwriting and financial models, that in turn can be linked to a bank and extend credit to the company’s customer.”

Also read: Ola applies for an NBFC licence in a bid to diversify, retain stake

Sanjay Jain, Partner at Bharat Innovation Fund, said,

“Our decision to invest in CreditVidya was driven by its ability to produce the most advanced credit underwriting platform and products in the country, along with a strong alignment with our larger mission of using deep tech innovation to enable financial inclusion.”

Abhishek adds that the team will use big data and deep tech to help formal lenders significantly expand the coverage of unsecured, retail and working capital loans. CreditVidya claims to have profiled over 13 million customers on its AI underwriting stack and says that the results were twice as powerful as traditional bureau scores.

The team claims to have partnered with more than 40 leading banks and NBFCs, including SBI, Bajaj Finserv, Fullerton India, HDFC Ltd, ICICI Bank, Axis Bank, IndusInd bank, RBL, Tata Capital, AEON Finance, ABFL and YES Bank.

Launched in 2013, CreditVidya is a platform that provides AI-powered credit underwriting APIs to NBFCs, other financial institutions and companies. The Hyderabad-based company helps lenders make critical decisions based on credit scores assigned to new-to-credit and thin file customers through non-traditional data sources.

These sources can be behavioural (pending payments or categories of purchases), social networks and transactional (through recharges or ecommerce spends). All this information is received from the borrower’s smartphone or e-mails based on their permission.

Also read: After Ola, used cars marketplace Cars24 applies for NBFC licence to start lending