Online digital lending platform Lendingkart, which facilitates lending to startups and small and medium enterprises, has raised $10 million in Series A funding, or about ₹63 crore, from venture capital funds Saama Capital and Mayfield Fund and two Ultra HNIs (high net worth individuals.)
The founders, Harshvardhan Lunia and Mukul Sachan, plan to use the funds to build a stronger technology platform, an artificially intelligent Big Data Scoring System and to expand the team. “We are aiming to enhance our loan evaluation capabilities by six times per month, build capable technology and data partnerships, create a 46 member technology team for loan products and increase the strength of our in-house Analytics lab,” said co-founder and CEO Harshvardhan Lunia.
Lendingkart has partnered with two of the country’s largest e-commerce marketplaces, Flipkart and Snapdeal, to provide hassle-free, working capital loans to their sellers and has also started working with fashion and lifestyle e-tailer Jabong to do the same.
It has tied up with other platforms, including Power2sme and Mswipe, and is also looking at other such platforms that can give it secondary verified data for vendors, for loan evaluation.
Loans ranging from ₹60,000 to ₹50 lakh are evaluated in a day. The loan application process is 100 per cent online and takes 15 minutes to complete.
The start-up also owns a registered NBFC to comply with RBI regulations and the loans are disbursed by this NBFC and other affiliated partners.
Decision making time to sanction loans on Lendingkart has been brought down from 48 hours last year to sub-4 hours today, it claims.
The company has currently facilitated loans to small and medium enterprises across more than 50 cities and 17 states in India.