SmartCoin, a Bengaluru-based micro-lending startup, announced it has raised about $7 million in a fresh financing round, led by LGT Lightstone Aspada. Existing investors that took part in the funding round include Unicorn India Ventures and Accion Venture Lab. Earlier, the company had raised $2 million from Accion’s seed-stage, fintech-focused investment arm, and others.
The company will utilise the current funding to further grow its loan book to Rs 1,500 crore, and is also targeting doubling its user base to 10 million over the next 12 months, a senior executive of the company said.
“While traditional players find it difficult to serve them owing to volatile incomes and lack of formal financial and credit histories, we have been able to harness the power of alternate data and machine learning through our proprietary AI/ML powered risk-assessment engines,” Rohit Garg, the chief executive of SmartCoin, said.
“We are excited to back SmartCoin, one of the strongest teams in machine learning and AI in financial services. SmartCoin’s business model has the ability to provide data-driven insights in a customer segment that is otherwise opaque and can unlock means of formal credit and financial services,” Kartik Srivatsa, managing partner, LGT Lightstone Aspada, said.
SmartCoin was founded in 2016 by Rohit Garg, Amit Chandel, Jayant Upadhyay and Vinay Kumar Singh. It offers small-ticket personal loans to micro-merchants and self-employed blue and grey-collar workers, who, they claim, are underserved by banks, other NBFCs and micro-lending institutions.
Unitus Capital acted as the financial advisor to the transaction.
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