[Funding alert] Fintech startup FinBox raises pre-Series A funding from Arali Ventures

Bengaluru-based fintech startup, FinBox on Thursday said, it has raised an undisclosed amount as part of its pre-Series A funding led by Arali Ventures. The round also saw participation from marquee angel investor Anup Pai, Founder of financial services company, Fintellix.

The startup plans to use the funds for R&D and expanding its product suite. The company is also looking to hire across its engineering, data science and product management segments. 

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FinBox was part of the 2017 FinTech cohort of PayPal’s Indian incubator programme. It currently has a team of 25 individuals.

Founded by Rajat Deshpande, Anant Deshpande, Nikhil Bhawsinka and Srijan Nagar, FinBox is a B2B credit risk management platform with proprietary data connectors, that assists in lending to self-employed merchants, non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) and new-to-credit customers.

Commenting on their vision, the founders said,

“Digital lending requires reimagination of tools from scratch, FinBox’s vision is to accelerate financial inclusion through big data and machine learning tools. The impact would be far reaching. Financial services firms will be able to leverage their dark data and consume new data sources to significantly improve credit risk performance while enhancing user adoption.”

Its data connector API’s - DeviceConnect and BankConnect, bring an alternative source of data to the client’s platform, enabling automated credit decisions. This further enables NBFC’s to lower credit risk, improve approval rates and digitally onboard customers.

FinBox’s product suite is used by a mix of traditional consumer NBFCs, as well as, new age startup NBFCs. 

Speaking about the investment, Arun Raghavan, Co-founder and Partner, Arali Ventures, said,

“We believe that Indian banking and financial services will be driven to balance credit risk while increasing penetration. FinBox’s tech+data approach is ideally suited to ride that wave.”

Although the company was incorporated in 2015, the platform was only launched in 2017.

At present, the platform processes about one million loan applications a month. Most of these applications are from new-to-credit customers, the company said.

(Edited by Suman Singh)

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