Kunal Shah’s Newtap Technologies In Talks To Raise $50-70 Mn

Kunal Shah’s CRED is looking to raise $50-70 Mn for its non-banking finance (NBFC) platform Newtap Technologies. The fundraising is to help scale its participation and credit exposure to the CRED user base.

Newtap Technologies was incorporated by Kunal Shah in 2021 who owns 80% stake in the company, while CRED owns 20%. Shah and his brother Rohan Shah Naresh are holding the position of directors in the fintech firm.

CRED’s Shah has been talking to the company’s existing investors including Sequoia Capital and Singapore’s sovereign fund GIC for the fundraise at a valuation of $250 Mn, ET reported.

Further, CRED is looking to infuse equity capital to build trust towards its NBFC entity and raise debt capital to maintain equity-to-debt ratio.

“While it is clear after the digital lending guidelines last year that fintechs have to be regulated, there is heightened action now since most players want to start lending from their own NBFC units and reduce dependency on partnerships,” source said as quoted in the report.

“Colending and direct loans from books…it will be a mixture of both moving forward for fintech NBFCs,” the person added.

The development comes at a time when CRED is expanding its product offerings as it is focusing on scaling up its revenue. The fintech major recently rolled out its Unified Payments Interface (UPI)-based peer-to-peer (P2P) payments system. The service will allow CRED customers to make P2P payments for sending money to other users via UPI IDs or contact numbers. 

In February, CRED also launched its buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) product called CRED Flash and prior to that, it launched its tap-to-pay offering for retail payments using credit cards.

The company saw its net loss surge 2.4X year-on-year (YoY) to INR 1,279 Cr in the financial year 2021-22 (FY22) while revenue from operations stood at INR 393.5 Cr. 

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