[Funding alert] Fintech startup FinBox raises $15M in Series A round led by A91 Partners

Bengaluru-based B2B credit infrastructure fintech FinBox has raised $15 million (Rs 115 Crore) in Series A led by A91 Partners, along with participation from Aditya Birla Ventures and Flipkart Ventures. Existing investors Arali Ventures also participated in the round.

According to the press statement, FinBox will use the funding to scale its offerings and expand to South East Asia. The company also announced that it’ll be doubling its current workforce to power its expansion.

This fundraise will enable FinBox to disburse over Rs 20,000 crore worth of credit by 2023 and will launch the fintech startup in several parts of South East Asia.

Over the last 12 months, the company has seen its monthly revenue grow more than 700 percent, even as its credit facilitation GMV grew by more than 80x post the launch of its Embedded Finance platform in January 2021. With this funding, FinBox aims to power over 10 million SMEs through formal credit through its marquee partnerships with 50+ banks, NBFCs, and FinTechs, the company stated.

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.

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FinBox counts the likes of ZestMoney, Khatabook, TrueBalance, Home Credit India, IIFL, large conglomerates, telcos, banks, NBFCs, and other Fortune India 500 companies among its clients.

Speaking about its new development, Rajat Deshpande, CEO and Co-founder, FinBox, stated,

“The future of financial services lies in every company and brand providing a curated set of offerings to their own users in their own platforms and ecosystems. This not only improves trust but also the velocity of transactions and helps users get the financial products they want, wherever they want them. We enable that by allowing any company, including fintechs, banks, and conglomerates, to offer 100 percent digital products within a matter of days."

Deshpande added that the goal at FinBox is to take the complexity out of financial services and make it easier to build and launch newer, more effective products without hard work. 

Commenting on the investment, Kaushik Anand, Partner, A91 Partners, added,

"Financial services are moving out of the physical premises into the palms of the users. This requires credit and underlying value chains to be reimagined and built from the ground up for a digital-first era. FinBox is the most prominent credit infrastructure player in the region and we back the team to lead this transformation. FinBox is well placed to become the leading infrastructure player for banking-as-a-service internationally too."

Anant Deshpande, Co-founder and head of data products, FinBox, stated, “Our data products, including our proprietary scores, create an instant trust between lenders and millions of borrowers, thus enabling us and our lender partners to create automated yet low-risk lending workflows for deeper financial inclusion. We realised early that responsible use of alternate data for underwriting can be a game-changer for lenders in India, where less than 50 percent of credit eligible population is able to prove its creditworthiness and access credit.”

(This story has been updated to correct that the company is only foraying into SEA)