Alok Mittal – former India head of Canaan Partners – led Indifi Technologies, which was officially launched yesterday, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Accel Partners and Elevar Equity. The startup also raised money from Pramod Bhasin (founder and former CEO of Genpact), Rajan Anandan, Gaurav Dalmia, Abhishek Goyal, Gagan Hasteer and ArunTadanki.
“The support from Accel and Elevar allows us to build a platform that truly optimizes the experience that we can deliver to the borrowers, at the same time provide an efficient and effective credit solution to lenders,” Alok told Inc42.
He enters the entrepreneurial space with this venture after long gap of almost 10 years. Alok exited his earlier startup JobsAhead – an e-recruitment startup that was acquired by Monster for about $6 mn, in February 2005.
“MSMEs contribute to nearly 38% of the country’s GDP, but at the same time, suffer from $380B formal debt financing gap. Proliferation of data in this space has created a unique opportunity to address this gap,” he said.
The company collects demographic, business and financial data, and analyzes it to assist these businesses in securing credit from banks and NBFCs.
It takes a segment specific approach, where in the product design and data models are designed keeping in mind the requirements of the segment. Lending products in any given segment are tightly integrated with the business cash flows and transactional linkages in that segment. Currently, Indifi is live in three business segments across travel, transportation and retail sectors.
It generates its revenue from a fee levied on lenders for the services offered to them – from marketing, to data collection and analysis, and on-ground documentation and verification. Indifi also assists institutions in monitoring the possible risk of default on an ongoing basis by analyzing transactions undertaken by such borrowers over the life of the loan. It has already partnered with two financial institutions who lend through the Indifi platform.
“Backed by innovation and technology, we seek to improve access, reduce the overall credit operations cost by 50-60%, and enable disbursements within a mere 4 days from application,” added Alok.
Alok is joined by Siddharth Mahanot as the cofounder of Indifi, along with Sundeep Sahi, who is also the company’s CTO.
