Inside fintech startup KreditBee’s remarkable growth story amid the pandemic

Founded in 2018, fintech player KreditBee has been helping professionals with personal loans and financial services. In wake of the pandemic, like any other company, KreditBee had to overcome a few challenges to boost their growth.

Commenting on the effect of the pandemic, Madhusudan Ekambaram, Co-founder and CEO, KreditBee, says the market has become credit-driven in the post-COVID-19 era.

As a fintech platform, KreditBee has disbursed over $2 billion worth of loans in the last three years, has over five million credit borrowers, and issues over 15,000 loans per day. To push consumption and provide customers with sensible offers, the startup introduced KreditBee cards.

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At present, growth has become one of the key business strategies for KreditBee. “We have aggressive growth plans to increase our credit and banking customer base,” Madhusudhan says. Apart from that, the company is also looking forward to strengthening its product lines.

“We aspire to be the leading financial services platform offering banking products to the middle class of India,” he adds.

Madhusudan explains that since the start, KreditBee has typically been a personal loan company. In this financial year, within the personal loans segment, the company aims to disburse $1 billion worth of loans.

Next up: BNPL

KreditBee launched cards towards the end of August and is presently issuing over 5,000 cards daily. “By March 2022, we are looking at issuing at least more than 250,000 cards every month,” he says.

In addition, the company is also launching BNPL, or Buy Now Pay Later, in integration with multiple payment gateways and merchants. Apart from lending, financial services are also a key business line for KreditBee. The company has a SaaS platform to provide API services to multiple fintech companies and brands.

Madhusudan shares the company aimed to raise funds in November 2020 amidst the peak of the pandemic and managed to close the round by raising about $150 million. It has just been six months since they closed their Series C round, with prominent investors like Azim Premji’s Premji Invest, Mirae Asset Ventures, etc.

“With respect to fundraising and dilution, we have been pretty disciplined. Also, within one year of our operations, we were a profitable company,” Madhusudan says. The company intends to launch a new funding round in the coming year to utilise the opportunity in the market.

He adds that owing to the pandemic, there was a lot of movement of people from metro cities to Tier II or III cities and reverse migration when things started to get better. There was a different geographical perspective about the credit behaviour of the people.

“COVID-19 itself has given us a lot of credit variables that we were not traditionally looking at, and now, it has become very important for us to look into,” Madhusudan says.