BankBazaar Bags Another Investment From Amazon

Chennai-based online financial marketplace BankBazaar has raised INR 29 Cr in an ongoing Series D round from Amazon and Walden SKT Venture Fund.

Sequoia, GUS Holdings, and Eight Roads Investments have also participated in the round. Besides this, even BankBazaar’s top executives like founders Adhil Shetty and Arjun Shetty, CTO Murari Sridharan, the company’s chief delivery officer Iype Isac, and CFO Ramesh Srinivasan have made an investment in this round.

As per the ministry of corporate affairs filling accessed by Inc42, BankBazaar has issued 12,337 shares to Amazon for INR 5.6 Cr, 15,421 shared to Walden SKT Venture Fund for INR 7.1 Cr, 4,978 shares to GUS Holdings for INR 2.2 Cr, 5,782 shares to Sequoia for INR 2.6 Cr and 3,338 shares to Eight Roads for INR 1.5 Cr.

Adhil Shetty and Arjun Shetty have invested INR 2.6 Cr and INR 3.2 Cr, respectively.  Meanwhile, Isac, Sridharan and Srinivasan have invested INR 1.4 Cr, INR 99 Lakh and INR 1.4 Cr.

Back in 2015, Amazon had invested INR 373 Cr ($60 Mn back then) in the Series C funding round of BankBazaar. Fidelity Growth Partners and Mousse Partners had also participated in the round. Two years later, the company raised $30 Mn in Series D funding round led by credit rating agency and information management company Experian.

BankBazaar started its operations in 2008 and was founded by former Deloitte Touche Tomahatsu executive Adhil, former Amazon executive Arjun and former Kraft employee Rati Shetty. The company sells tailor-made financial products like credit cards, car loans, personal loans, education loans and more on its website. With its paperless finance platform, it aims to create a secure and more transparent process for financial inclusion.

Back in 2017, the company launched a credit score product, which offers free monthly credit reports and tips to improve credit score. Adhil, previously, highlighted that the credit score product helped the company reach out to more users. So far, the company has served more than 2.3 Cr banks and has more than 50 banks on board.

Now, the company has switched its focus towards turning profitable by this year and go public by 2020. Talking to Mint in February 2020, Aadil had said that the company is on track to become EBIDTA profitable by financial year 2020, which ended in March 2020.

He elaborated that the company noted an average monthly growth of 46% in its revenue between October 2019 to January 2020. Moreover, the company also managed to cut its cost by 17% during this period.