As we started looking at the fintech lending market in India, we saw that the opportunity was in the under-penetrated SMB market. For decades, the incumbent banking system has been unable to cater to this demand for a variety of reasons. At the same time, the opportunity at hand is pegged at ~$600 billion in terms of total SMB sector demand for capital. This essentially meant that we needed to invest in a team that approached the problem differently with a technology first mindset: a fintech company which could evaluate credit, acquire customers online and match collection figures, leveraging technology in a cost-efficient manner.
When we met the founding team at Lendingkart, we appreciated their technology-forward approach to solving the SMB credit problem. As we delved deeper into the team’s plans on catering to this market, we were convinced that Lendingkart had a huge opportunity to become a market leader.
Over time, Lendingkart has emerged as India’s leading online lending company dedicated to providing entrepreneurs and small businesses with debt capital for working capital requirements. The team applies big data and analytics to evaluate a borrower’s creditworthiness. The company started operations by targeting sellers in the fast-growing ecommerce industry; however, over time, it has expanded across multiple other sectors including apparel, computers, mobile phones and FMCG.
Since inception, Lendingkart has disbursed over $1 billion in loans across 1300+ cities in India, giving it the largest geographical digital footprint in the country. In addition to its lending product, the company now also cross-sells products such as gold loans, insurance products and other lending products through partners.
Lendingkart has also developed a tech-led co-lending platform called 2gthr, where third party lenders like banks and non-bank lenders can co-lend with Lendingkart while the platform originates, underwrites and undertakes collections of the loan. This is a crucial development as it now puts Lendingkart on track to becoming a transaction-based, asset-light business, thereby enabling potential for rapid scale.
With India now being one of the fastest growing economies in the world, its 75 million SMBs are going to continually require capital support to grow their businesses. We believe that Lendingkart is primed to aid the SMBs of India and continue its journey to becoming one of the largest fintech digital lenders of the country.