Apps And Alternative Finance Gain FinTech Investor Favor In India

Three months to go, more or less.

In terms of the total amount invested to date in FinTechs, as tracked by PYMNTS via the India FinTech Tracker, the year to date tally stands at just under $3.7 billion.  Of that, logistics holds sway, at just over 29.5 percent, eCommerce at 23.8 percent and Alternative Finance at about 14.3 percent.

Taking the pulse of where we stand coming into the last few months of 2019, deal activity has seemingly been concentrated within the alternative finance and investment arenas.

As was reported during September, Groww, a startup based in Bangalore, said that it raised $21.4 million through a Series B financing round that was in turn led by Ribbit Capital, based in the United States.  There also was participation from existing investors including Sequoia India and Y Combinator.

As reported by TechCrunch, the tally raised to date comes in at $29 million. Groww focuses on investment products and services marketed to millennials.  Within the general population, according to the publication, of the 1.3 billion people across the country, 100 million use digital payments applications – but of that number, only 20 million invest in offerings such as mutual funds and stocks. The company offers investment planning and equity-linked savings accounts. Groww has said that it has 2.5 million registered users and according to TechCrunch roughly two-thirds of them are first time users.

OK Credit

Also in a Series B round, OKCredit raised $67 million, in an announcement at the beginning of last month that showed investment by Lightspeed and Tiger Global. The total raised by the startup, which traces its genesis back two years, stands at $83 million. The company offers and operates an app that allows users to track daily spend. The company has said that its user base tops five million users, spanning 2,000 cities in the country. Sites such as TechCrunch report that a number of merchants have also joined the company’s audience of active users. The capital raised, according to reports, will be used in part to grow that merchant user base.

NeoGrowth

Also in the lending space, NeoGrowth Credit, which focuses on SME lending, has raised $17 million through debt financing from France’s Proparco.  The site vccircle.com said the funding will be used to expand the reach into thousands more SMEs through the next five years.  The FinTech had already raised $47 million in equity financing.

Indifi Technologies

Indifi Technologies, an SMB-focused lending platform in India, completed a Series C funding round led by the U.K. government-owned finance institution CDC Group. Existing investors Accel, Elevar Equity, Omidyar Networks and Flourish Ventures also participated in the round.

And in a nod to the fact that India’s FinTech sector is heating up, Inc42 reports that Switzerland-based IT security solutions EST Group “has said it is bullish on Indian startups.”  EST Group said that it will seek to invest as much as $250 million in startups, with an eye on the FinTech sector.  Sindhu Bhaskar, director and CEO, EST Group told the site that EST Group is planning to invest in companies (and by extension business models) that the site said “will plug into its larger vision of building an aggregated platform for capital.”