Rural-FinTech Navadhan secures $5m in Pre-Series A round

By Gloria Mathias

India-based FinTech start-up Navadhan has raised $5 million (INR 40 crore) in its Pre-Series A round led by Prime Venture Partners.

Existing investors, Varanium NexGen FinTech Fund and Gemba Capital, also participated in the round. The new funds will be used to further enhance the company’s AceN tech platform and scale up the company’s distribution and service delivery models.

Navadhan’s AceN tech platform enables full-service customer fulfilment starting from sourcing, seamless digital enrolments, credit underwriting, servicing, and payments to collections. It has over Rs.300 Cr of lines available from 20 banks and NBFCs on its platform, with whom AceN enables API integrations into their existing systems.

Navadhan’s proprietary alternative underwriting model assesses the digital footprint and cash flow surrogates. This solves the lack of income proofs and documents that have kept the banks away from such markets. This approach addresses the challenges of the cash-based economy and the limited banking track record in rural and informal markets. Navadhan has both people and Tech on the ground with a brick-to-click model.

Nitin Agrawal, Founder of Navadhan, said, “Prime has a reputation of being a thoughtful investor, and we greatly enjoyed the interactions and rigour with which they worked with the Navadhan team, including visiting and interacting with our customers. We are excited to have them join our journey in building a tech-led business model with a revenue-first approach and a vision of creating new wealth for the rural-preneurs. The new fundraiser will add tailwinds to our efforts at building solutions to bring such small businesses to the formal economy. We will continue to build it for Bank, and NBFCs to leverage on the regulatory advantage of priority sector assets.”

“Nitin, his co-founders and the Navadhan team have demonstrated an extremely viable and tech-driven model for distribution, underwriting, and robust collections while leveraging co-lending to achieve meaningful scale. We truly believe they have created a very attractive model and are delighted to be the catalyst in the next phase of growth of this company,” said Sanjay Swamy, Managing Partner, Prime Venture Partners.