Former Flipkart CTO Ravi Garikipati has launched a financial services and micro-credit startup along with serial entrepreneur Raj Vattikuti, who in 2007 had sold his company Covansys to Computer Sciences Corp for $1.5 billion.
The duo, who have been friends for a long time, has seeded the venture, Davinta, with ₹140 crore of personal money. In April 2019, Ravi had applied for an NBFC licence to start Davinta Financial Services, a technology-focused umbrella NBFC for the underserved, which includes the rural, urban, and micro entrepreneur segments.
Davinta, primarily provides short-term credit of up to 12 months to underserved families and MSMEs, including rural women, urban blue-collar workers such as factory workers and nano entrepreneurs to further strengthen them. The company has a vision to enable sustainable financial inclusion at the bottom of the pyramid, by adopting ways to build a livelihood ecosystem that will connect borrowers to both input partners like skill development agencies and NGOs and output partners such as buyers and marketplaces.
Since its launch, Davinta has disbursed loans to about 10,000 customers, of which 85% are women.
“We have a low-cost operating model that is tech-driven, paperless, cashless and presence-less to be able to deliver to the last-mile disbursal and collections via a network of small franchisees,” Garikipati said. “We have built a unique underwriting model that in ‘near’ real-time creates specific customer profiles based on a list of variables.”
The Board members of Davinta includes former deputy managing director of SBI Ashwin Mehra and (Retd) Air Marshal Joseph Neri, having extensive experience in designing and implementing social and economic uplift programmes for rural population.
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