Rural fintech firm Navadhan raises Rs 111 crore in Series A round, surpasses its initial Rs 80 crore target

Rural fintech firm Navadhan has raised Rs 111 crore in a Series A funding round, surpassing its initial target of 80 crore. The round was led by NabVentures, the venture capital arm of NABARD, and co-led by Prime Venture Partners. 

Other participants include LNB Group, which invests in tech startups through venture capital funds and AIFs, as well as existing investors Varanium NexGen Fintech Fund, Gemba Capital, Faad, VC-Grid, and Anicut. 

This marks the fourth funding round for Navadhan in the past three years.

Strengthening the AceN platform

Navadhan plans to use the newly raised capital to expand its business operations and further develop its AceN technology platform, which facilitates working capital financing for rural micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs).

The firm claims to have more than Rs 700 crore in debt lines available through over 25 banks and NBFCs on its AceN platform, supported by API-based integrations.

"We are happy to find investors who share our mission of creating new wealth (Nava-dhan) for the rural-preneurs. At an early stage, Tech investors helped us in building the AceN tech platform. We are very excited now to have NabVentures since rural MSMEs are our core customer segment," said Nitin Agrawal, Founder of Navadhan.

Who are the founders?

Co-founded by Nitin Agrawal, Amit Biswal, Vijay Haswani, and Anirudh Ramakuru, Navadhan's AceN tech platform facilitates working capital financing to rural small businesses (MSMEs). 

"MSMEs is a big focus area for the government to enhance employment generation at the local level in rural and semi-urban areas," the firm said.

"Navadhan's AceN tech platform is one of the more advanced tech platforms that build on top of IndiaStack to provide differentiated underwriting capabilities, and this has played out in the performance metrics of Navadhan", said Sanjay Swamy, Managing Partner, Priven Advisors, Advisory to Prime Venture Partners.

A hybrid model for rural lending

Navadhan operates on a brick-to-click model, combining on-the-ground support with a fully digital workflow. It spent its first two years building the AceN platform before starting lending operations.

AceN has full-service customer fulfilment workflows with a paperless, seamless customer journey from onboarding, underwriting, and servicing to multi-mode collections. It also has proprietary data sciences backed tech-tools embedded into its workflows.

Navadhan holds an NBFC license from the Reserve Bank of India. It currently serves more than 700 PIN codes across five states—Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Karnataka, and Odisha—and plans to further deepen its presence and diversify its loan offerings.