Supply Chain Financing Startup Nakad Raises $7M

Nakad, the supply chain financing provider, has raised $7 million as part of its seed funding round, Economic Times of India reported.

According to the company, the new funds will be used for scaling its presence and boosting its employee head count, adding people in technology, product, customer success and business development.

Nakad, which was founded in January, provides working capital credit for the small suppliers of corporate vendors.

The report says the company uses its platform MicroBill to tokenize invoices from the small- to midsize enterprise (SME) and help them get working capital.

Co-founder and Chief Executive Ujwal Kalra has said the mission for supply chain financing companies is often these days to tackle the anchor supplier of the corporations that have options for working capital. So Nakad focuses on the smaller companies where the “real issue of SME financing lies.”

The report says Nakad is also looking at rolling out other credit products, and building software layers to help SMEs digitize their billing and reconciliation processes.

See also: SME Financing Platform Crowdz Raises $10M

In news of similar work, Crowdz, an invoice financing platform, also raised $10 million in financing, PYMNTS wrote, with the plan being to work with Citi, which led the round, to give working capital to SMEs.

“The current state of the supply chain cycle for SMEs is overwhelmingly defined by fragmentation and delays, inefficiencies which cost them over $3 trillion annually,” the company said.

Crowdz, based in California, integrates with clients’ accounting, payment processing and banking systems to let businesses get paid early at competitive rates, letting small businesses sell invoices to funders for financing.

The company platform also comes with proprietary risk scoring, giving lenders access to “attractive risk-adjusted, diversified returns, while helping to plug the SME finance gap.”