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Commencing the third funding in just one year, Gurgaon-based Online P2P lending marketplace, Faircent.com, has secured an undisclosed amount in funding from chairman of Manipal Global Education, TV Mohandas Pai led Aarin Capital Partners.
With this, Pai will join the board of Faircent as advisor and will ensure the leadership in credit appraisal technology and mobile.
Prior to this, Faircent had raised pre-Series A round of $250K from M&S Partners at an enterprise valuation of $8 Mn in June this year. Also, Faircent grabbed an undisclosed amount in its first round of funding from Devash Sachdev and Ashish Tiwari, promoters of Fusion Microfinance Pvt Ltd at $4 Mn valuation in January this year.
According to Rajat Gandhi, CEO of Faircent, Faircent has also announced alliances with a US-based companies, TransUnion and Yodlee. TransUnion provides credit information and information management services to businesses whereas, Yodlee develops an account aggregation service for users to see their credit card, bank, investment, email, travel reward accounts, etc. on one screen.
Rajat said, “We are empowering every individual with surplus money to reach out to borrowers. This will bring down the cost of capital for borrowers.”
Faircent was founded in 2013 by Rajat Gandhi, Vinay Mathews and Nitin Gupta. The startup provides a platform where borrowers and lenders connect directly through which borrower get lower rate of interest and lenders get higher rate on savings.
The startup has over 15,000 borrowers and 3,000 lenders listed on the platform. It has deployments and commitments in excess of $460 K (INR 3 Cr) from individual lenders using the marketplace.
Faircent recently, developed proprietary technology to enable credit appraisal and borrower rating systems in India.
Speaking on the investment, Pai said, “There is a huge under-served market that has no access to credit and curated P2P lending is an excellent way to service them. Faircent has not only created access, but also brought down the cost of capital for individuals and businesses through its unique reverse auction engine. We expect Faircent to become the leader in the lending marketplace by using mobile technologies to have unparalleled outreach as compared with its peers.”
Earlier this year, Pai along with others has invested in startups like multilingual test preparation app OnlineTyari, media tech company YourStory, restaurant discounts startup Ressy, online media startup, TheBetterIndia, online tax information platform TaxSutra and more.
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