A91 Partners led a $15 million (INR 115 crore) investment round for Bengaluru-based B2B financial SaaS firm FinBox. Along with current investors Arali Ventures, Aditya Birla Ventures, and Flipkart Ventures took part in the investment round.
The funds will be used to grow the company’s operations and offerings, as well as expand into the Southeast Asian market. FinBox also stated that to support the expansion objectives, it will quadruple its present personnel.
FinBox is a fintech stack and data intelligence suite that allows entrepreneurs to build digital credit products including BNPL, personal loans, and invoice financing. It was founded in 2017 by Rajat Deshpande, Anant Deshpande, Srijan Nagar, and Nikhil Bhawsinka. Embedded finance in non-fintech firms is also facilitated by the company.
Around 25 banks, NBFCs, fintech, and credit markets benefit from its credit risk information. FinBox has 50 clients in total, including ZestMoney, Khatabook, TrueBalance, Home Credit India, and IIFL. By March 2023, the business promises to have allowed the release of INR 20,000 crore in credit.
FinBox’s Aim
FinBox’s mission, according to Rajat Deshpande, co-founder, and CEO, is to simplify financial services and make it easier to design and market newer, more successful solutions.
FinBox, according to the CEO, aims to provide finance to India’s 10 million small businesses. It intends to achieve so using an ecosystem approach, in which the user is at the center of the value chain, and goods and distribution are tailored to their needs. For all stakeholders, embedded finance infrastructure makes formal credit accessible, digitized, and financially sustainable, he noted.
“We are positive on embedded finance as a field,” said Piyush Bansal, head of Aditya Birla Ventures. “We are sure that the founding team at FinBox, with their excellent domain expertise and strong tech capabilities, is ideally situated to harness the tremendous potential that this area affords.”
India’s financial ecosystem is one of the strongest within the bigger startup ecosystem, with a total market opportunity of $1.3 trillion by 2025. Fintech SaaS is the third-fastest-growing area within fintech, with a CAGR of 40% expected between 2021 and 2025, resulting in a market opportunity of $12.6 billion. Lendingtech is the largest fintech category, accounting for 47% of the entire market opportunity by 2025, or $616 billion.