Rural Fintech Firm Navadhan Raises $5 Mn From Prime Venture Partners, Others

(MENAFN- Live Mint) "Rural fintech firm Navadhan has raised $5 million (about ₹40 crore) in a pre-Series A round led by Prime Venture Partners. Existing investors Gemba Capital and Varanium NexGen Fintech Fund also participated new funds will be used to enhance the company's AceN tech platform, which connects small, rural businesses with NBFCs and banks, and scale up its distribution and service delivery model, the startup said, which also owns a non-banking financial company, was co-founded by Nitin Agrawal, Vijay Haswani, Anirudh Ramakuru and Amit Biswal. A former ICICI Bank executive, Agarwal was responsible for setting up a rural finance business for Fullerton India and served as CEO of Spandana Sphoorty's AceN tech platform enables full-service customer fulfilment including sourcing, digital enrolments, credit underwriting, servicing, payments and collections. It has over ₹300 crore of credit lines available from 20 bank and NBFCs on its platform Agrawal said:“We are excited to have [Prime VP] join our journey in building a tech-led business model with a revenue-first approach and a vision of creating wealth for rural entrepreneurs. The new fundraise 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, NBFCs to leverage on the regulatory advantage of priority sector assets.”“The MSME sector in India has always been credit-starved, and yet remains one of the critical growth sectors in the country. 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,” said Sanjay Swamy, managing partner, Prime Venture Partners.

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