Fintech Unicorn CRED Acquihires Y Combinator-Backed Spenny

Fintech unicorn Cred has acquihired Y Combinator-backed micro-savings platform Spenny.

Spenny cofounder Rathin Shah took to Twitter to announce the news. “We’re excited to start a new journey working with the kickass team @CRED_club to take this mission forward. Onwards & upwards!” Shah said.

Founded in 2019 by Shah and Gaurav Arora, the Bengaluru-based startup allows its customers to save some spare change from their daily transactions so that a tiny portion of their money is invested without fail. The platform invests this amount in digital gold or a diversified mutual fund portfolio. Spenny earns a commission on each investment.

The Spenny deal is in line with CRED’s ambition to strengthen its fintech portfolio, especially in the lending segment.

In February this year, the Kunal Shah-led fintech unicorn launched its buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) product, CRED Cash. CRED is said to have helped create a loan book of INR 10,000 Cr for its lending partners through the product as of June 2023.

The unicorn acquired lending SaaS startup CreditVidya in November 2022, which operates Prefr, a digital lending platform that has developed underwriting and risk assessment models crucial for a lending product.

CreditVidya’s acquisition gave CRED access to a second non-banking financial company (NBFC), alongside Newtap Technologies, another NBFC owned by CEO Shah. The fintech unicorn also made investments in lending tech startups Liquiloans and CredAvenue last year before launching CRED Cash.

Meanwhile, it has also been launching new products in various categories. This year alone, it has launched a P2P UPI payments service, luxury travel vertical CRED escapes, and a tap-to-pay offering for retail payments using credit cards. Last October, CRED introduced a Scan & Pay feature on its app, enabling P2M UPI payments.

CRED has raised more than $920 Mn since its founding from marquee investors such as Singapore’s GIC, Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global, Alpha Wave and Dragoneer Investment Group, commanding a valuation of nearly $6.4 Bn.

However, the company’s loss continues to rise. In FY22, CRED’s net loss jumped 2.4X to INR 1,279 Cr, while total income rose to INR 422 Cr.