SMEcorner raises Rs 90 crore for MSME financing

NBFC Firm Digikredit Finance Pvt Ltd which is operating under the trade name SMEcorner has raised Rs 90 crore to catalyse MSME financing. According to reports, out of Rs 90 crore, Rs 35 crore of equity was infused by Accion Frontier Inclusion Fund managed by Quona Capital and the balance equity was infused by the existing investors including Accion Venture Lab.

SMEcorner is a new age NBFC that aims at providing easy and quick access to financial services to MSME sector. It has till date raised around Rs 200 crores in debt and equity and plans to raise additional rounds of equity and debt funding in the ensuing fiscal. The total debt and equity fund raised is expected to cross Rs 500 crore by end of next fiscal year.

SMEcorner is built in-house and customised to suit the needs of the MSMEs. It claims to have brought down the loan approval turnaround time to an average of three days as against traditional banks that take in excess of two weeks.

“SMEcorner focuses on small ticket loans to the unorganised retail segment. A large segment of our customers are retailers such as kirana stores, electrical shops, readymade garment sellers, chemists, etc who are the underfinanced section of our society. Recently, UPI and GST have led this segment to formalize and digitize their businesses. It is now seeking new avenues of funds to its fuel growth. We plan to use the new funds raised to add over 9000 customers and disburse over INR 1000 crores of loans by March 2020. We are proud of our unique model wherein our sales teams personally touch base with the customers to understand their financial needs and then we use our proprietary tech to evaluate, process and manage their cases. Our tech not only allows us to scale profitably but also helps the shopkeepers to access loans much faster”, said Samir Bhatia, Founder and CEO, SMEcorner.

The company obtained its NBFC liscence in February 2018 and since then it has disbursed over Rs 225 crores to its customers by using combination of proprietary application score card, OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and other forms of artificial intelligence to take a credit call. It offers loans of Rs 25,000 to Rs 25 lakhs. SMEcorner is currently present across 13 centres across nine cities in three states.

It intends to use the new round of funding for geographical expansion with 40 new tier-2 and tier-3 cities targeted in the next one year.

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