OkCredit Raises $15.5 Mn From Tiger Global, Y Combinator And Others

Bengaluru-based digital application provider for micro-merchants OkCredit, has raised $15.5 Mn in a Series A funding round led by New York-based investment fund Tiger Global. Morningside Venture Capital, Lightspeed India Partners, Venture Highway and Y Combinator also participated in this round of funding.

The startup will use the funding to further scale its merchant user base, grow its team and execute on its product roadmap.

Tiger Global is said to have added $10 Mn to the deal. The latest round takes the total funding raised by OkCredit to $17 Mn so far. The last round of $2 Mn seed funding was raised in August 2018 from Lightspeed India Partners Advisors. It was part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2018 batch.

Scott Shleifer, Partner, Tiger Global said, “The market for cloud-enabled software for India’s merchants is young and growing rapidly. We believe OkCredit is a strong market leader and are excited to support them over the coming years.”

Launched in April 2017 by Aditya Prasad, Gaurav Kumar, Harsh Pokharna, the startup has an interesting tagline: “Digital India ka Digital Udhaar Khata”. A mobile-based solution for small business owners and their customers, OkCredit helps them to enable recording of credit/payment transactions digitally all across the country, thereby adding the ability to provide on-demand visibility of the merchant’s record to the customers.

“We also want to replicate this solution to digitise all book-keeping between the wholesaler and the retailer, which will help automate all credit, stock-taking, and amount due,” said Harsh Pokharna, CEO, OkCredit in a media statement.

The founders claim to have 1.3 Mn downloads of the app out of which around 900K are said to be monthly active customers. It basically finds its application for recharge shops, kirana stores, bakery stores, medical stores, etc. It is currently present in over 1,000 locations and is said to have maximum customers in Hindi-speaking regions of the country.

The Indian startup ecosystem is witnessing an increased activity for Tiger Global after the acquisition of ecommerce unicorn Flipkart by Walmart last year, where Tiger Global has been a major investor.

In October 2018, Tiger Global raised a $3.75 Bn fund for investing on consumer Internet, cloud computing, Industry software as well as direct-to-consumer companies.

Tiger Global has recently invested in a number of startups including Grofers, NestAway, Ninjacart, WizRocket, Locus, Zenoti, TVF, Fyle and Facilio among others. Speculations are rife that PhonePe is also looking to raise about $1 Bn from marquee investors like China’s Tencent and Tiger Global. The analysts also believe that Tiger Global is now focusing primarily on B2B SaaS companies.

According to an April 2019 report by Nasscom, the cloud market in India is expected to grow 3-fold to $7.1 Bn by 2022.