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Mumbai-based non-banking financial company (NBFC) NeoGrowth Credit Pvt Ltd has raised a total of $7 Mn (INR 45 Cr) in its third round of funding which was led by Silicon Valley-based social venture investor Khosla Impact along with participation from its existing investors, Omidyar Network and Aspada Investment. Besides, Frontier Investments Group invested $2 Mn (INR 15 Cr) in the round.
NeoGrowth Credit plans to invest in new products and platform technologies and digital marketing and branding activities.
Managing director of NeoGrowth, Piyush Khaitan said, “We will use the raised funds to invest in building an additional layer on the existing platform that we built just two years ago. This will allow 100% customer self-service, more sophisticated underwriting scorecards, automated loan approval and a fully-integrated marketing and lead generation engine.”
Started in 2010 by Dhruv Khaitan and Piyush Khaitan, NeoGrowth Credit is a non-banking financial company, registered with RBI, which is providing short term business loans to Indian merchants for their business needs. The ecommerce marketplace player, Flipkart recently partnered with NeoGrowth and other financial companies to launch financial assistance programme for its merchants.
Besides ecommerce sellers, NeoGrowth’s primarily clientele include retailers and restaurants for which it provides business financing. The company has given out around 1,000 loans till date.
According to Ganesh Rengaswamy, MD, Frontier Group, “NeoGrowth has figured out a unique model and engine to be able to understand and lend to SMEs. There are about 11-12 million SMEs in the country, of which 15% accept electronic transactions and this number is growing rapidly. While most players focus on manufacturing SMEs, Neo-Growth focuses on services.”
Prior to this, NeoGrowth had raised $1.62 Mn (INR10 Cr) from Aspada Investment Company and about $2.7 Mn (INR 17 Cr) from Omidyar Network.
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