Markets: Navadhan to scale AceN tech platform

New fundraise will add tailwinds to bring small-businesses for formal economy, says Agrawal

Rural-fintech Navadhan of Mumbai says the recently raised Rs.40 crore (US$5 million) will be used to further enhance the company’s AceN tech platform and scale up the company’s distribution and service delivery model, given that its Pre-Series A round was led by Prime Venture Partners and supported by participation by existing investors, Varanium NexGen Fintech Fund and Gemba Capital.

Navadhan Founder Nitin Agrawal said on 6 Dec, “Prime has a reputation of being a thoughtful investor and we greatly enjoyed the interactions and rigour with which they worked with the Navadhan team, including visiting and interacting with our customers. We are excited to have them join our journey in building a Tech-led business model with a Revenue-first approach and a vision of creating new-wealth for the rural-preneurs.

“The new fundraise will add tailwinds to our efforts at building solutions to bring such small-businesses to the formal economy. We will continue to build it for Bank, NBFCs to leverage on the regulatory advantage of priority sector assets. It is still early days for us and we are excited by the massive opportunity ahead of us.”

Navadhan’sAceN tech platform enables full-service customer fulfilment starting from sourcing, seamless digital enrolments, credit underwriting, servicing, payments to collections. It has over Rs.300 Cr of lines available from 20 Bank and NBFCs on its platform with whom AceN enables API integrations into their existing systems. Navadhan’s own NBFC licence has played a key role in ensuring regulatory compliant workflows for co-lending.

With the power of data science, Navadhan’s proprietary alternative underwriting model assesses the digital footprint and cash flow surrogates. This solves the lack of income proofs and documents which has kept the banks away from such markets. This innovative approach addresses the challenges of the predominantly cash-based economy and limited banking track record in rural and informal markets. Navadhan has both people and Tech on the ground with a brick-to-click model.

Navadhan was co-founded by Nitin Agrawal along with 3 teammates – Vijay Haswani, Anirudh Ramakuru and Amit Biswal. Nitin saw the recent surge of digitisation as an opportunity to build a tech-led finance platform. This comes from his 2 decades of experience including leading Product-Tech for micro-banking and agri-channel finance at ICICI, setting up a rural finance business for Fullerton India and in the recent past, serving as CEO of Spandana Sphoorty, a listed NBFC-MFI.

“The MSME sector in India has always been credit-starved, and yet remains one of the critical growth sectors in the country. Nitin, his co-founders and the Navadhan team, have demonstrated an extremely viable and tech-driven model for distribution, underwriting, and robust collections, while leveraging co-lending to achieve meaningful scale. We truly believe they have created a very attractive model and are delighted to be the catalyst in the next phase of growth of this company,” said Sanjay Swamy, Managing Partner, Prime Venture Partners.

Navadhan Capital Private Limited aspires to become the largest finance platform for Rural India by connecting NBFCs/Banks with Small Businesses/Microenterprises (MSMEs) through the sourcing and servicing of financial services. Navadhan had earlier raised USD 3M in Seed and Angel rounds from Anicut Capital, Singapore-based impact fund BOPA, Flowstate, Angelist, Faad, SaakavFirstbridge and angels from Fintech and Agri-tech space.

Prime Venture Partners is an early-stage VC fund started in 2012 with the objective of bringing Silicon Valley style professionalism to venture investing and building world class companies. Fiinews.com