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Navadhan Founders
Rural fintech startup Navadhan, which connects rural small businesses with NBFCs and banks, has raised $1.5 million in a seed funding round led by Varanium NexGen and existing investor Anicut Capital, with participation from Gema Capital.
Previously, the startup raised pre-Seed funding from Anicut, BOPA, Flowstate and other angels like Prasanna Rao (Arya.ag), Sarah Djari (Impact Fintech PE).
It intends to use the raised funding to build its AceN Tech platform further.
The startup claims to have enrolled over 200K+ customers and disbursed over Rs100 crore in partnership with 15 lenders like Ugro, Vivriti, Northern Arc, Caspian, Unitus and TruCap.
With the power of data sciences, Navadhan said that its proprietary alternative-underwriting model assesses the digital footprint and cashflow surrogates. This solves for lack of income proofs and documents which has kept the Banks away from such markets, the startup said.
Founded by Nitin Agrawal, Vijay Haswani, Anirudh Ramakuru and Amit Biswal, Nitin saw the recent surge of digitisation as an opportunity to build a tech-led finance platform. This comes from his 2 decades of experience with a stint at ICICI Bank, leading Product-Tech for micro-banking and agri-channel finance.
According to the company's statement, Nitin was also involved in setting up a rural finance business for Fullerton India. In recent past, he also served as CEO of Spandana Sphoorty, a listed NBFC-MFI.
Nitin Agrawal, Founder CEO of Navadhan, said, "We are a tech-led and revenue-first fintech. Our mission is to help create new-wealth for the rural small-entrepreneurs by solving for their challenges. We are leveraging Tech using alternative-credit, predictive analytics backed by data sciences. With both Tech and People on-ground, we are making it work for the NBFCs and Banks to generate priority sector assets. The new fund raise will add tailwinds to our growth plans. As the Smart-phone and UPI penetration improves, we have an early mover advantage in the rural markets.”
Speaking about the development, Aparajit Bhandarkar of Varanium NexGen, said, “India is growing and Rural markets are not far behind. While most of the fintech space is focussed at Tier-1,2,3, we saw Navadhan’s focus on the informal market as a potential high-growth area. Navadhan’s founders are seasoned professionals with credible experience in financial services. With the right TAM, Team, Tech, and Traction, they are building an early mover’s advantage in rural-markets. Tech-led approach gives non-linear scalability to their model. We see Navadhan as a potential market leader in making.”
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