To broaden its fintech products under Zoho Payments, SaaS startup Zoho has introduced its line of point-of-sale (POS) devices, which includes an all-in-one POS device, smart POS device, and static QR with soundbox. Sridhar Vembu, a co-founder of Zoho, made the announcement on X.
In order to tackle “real business challenges and strengthen India’s digital payments infrastructure”, Zoho has also teamed up with NPCI Bharat BillPay Ltd (NBBL), a subsidiary of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), Vembu continued. According to Vembu, the business is also working on integrating Zoho Pay with Arattai, its instant messaging app, so that payments may be made through the app.
Zoho Also Announces Pool of Payment Solutions
On the outskirts of today’s ongoing “Global Fintech Fest 2025” in Mumbai, Zoho also announced the availability of a variety of payment options, including payout capabilities, virtual accounts for collections, and marketplace settlements.
According to a statement from the firm, Zoho Payments now facilitates payouts, allowing companies who use Zoho Payroll to automate employee payroll procedures and make salary disbursements. Companies have a more dependable method of transferring money, can track payments made, and can pay salaries from any bank account with ease.
In February of last year, Zoho was granted final permission for a payment aggregator licence. After then, the business launched Zoho Payments, marking its entry into the payments market. At the time, Zoho said that companies could simplify their payment procedures by integrating Zoho Payments with its financial and operations apps, such as Zoho Books, Zoho Invoice, and Zoho Billing.
Zoho Strongly Backed by the Indian Government
The recent product introductions by Zoho coincide with a renewed interest in goods manufactured in India. Ashwini Vaishnaw, the minister of information technology, recently openly supported Zoho’s software package for official government work. In the meantime, Arattai has experienced a dramatic increase in downloads in recent weeks.
Additionally, Zoho launched a new sub-brand last week named Vani to provide “visual” workplace communication products driven by AI. Along with its extensive language model, the company unveiled a suite of AI tools in July to help organisations with automation, easy integration, and customised AI agents. In order to increase its robotics research and development skills, it also purchased the robotics firm Asimov Robotics earlier this year.
Quick Shots
•Zoho launches new POS devices and soundbox under
Zoho Payments to boost digital payment solutions.
•Zoho collaborates with NPCI Bharat BillPay Ltd
(NBBL) to address real-world payment challenges and strengthen India’s
digital infrastructure.
•Zoho plans to integrate Zoho Pay with Arattai messaging
app for in-app payments.
•Zoho introduces payout features, virtual accounts,
and marketplace settlements for businesses.
•Zoho received payment aggregator licence in Feb last
year, officially entering the payments market.
Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by ClearTax.
Tax filing is a tedious task! Be it a layman or a CA, it’s time-consuming and cumbersome to a great extent. Then came a startup in 2011 that made this process simpler for the people. Founded by Archit Gupta, Srivatsan Chari, and Ankit Solanki in 2011. ClearTax services range from tax preparation, e-filing, accounting, to investment planning solutions for individuals and businesses.
ClearTax has been rechristened to Clear on June 28, 2021. The brand has decided on the name ‘Clear’ to represent the whole gamut of services that it offers, which has now expanded to embrace invoices, wealth management, and credit.
Read this article to know more about ClearTax company, ClearTax founders, team, ClearTax journey, startup challenges, ClearTax competitors, ClearTax company details, ClearTax funding, and its investors.
ClearTax is built on the massive digitization process of the tax systems in India that the country is adopting. It is a Bangalore-based Financial Technology platform that provides solutions for income tax filing, GST, and mutual fund investments. ClearTax, with its tax and investment platform, aims to simplify the financial lives of the Indians. The Clear interface is designed in a way that the customers can easily find the services they want through an easy Cleartax login and a seamless operation.
The ClearTax journey started out by helping individual consumers, CAs, and businesses to prepare and file their tax returns by easy and effective means. For individual users, the process at ClearTax India is super simple and easy to understand. The user simply has to upload the Form 16 pdf to begin tax filing. This software reads all of it and fills out the tax returns instantly via an automatic process. Thus, ClearTax company eliminates any human factor intervention in computing and filing tax returns.
The customer gets fully prepared tax returns in just a matter of seconds. That’s not all of it about ClearTax. There’s more than the company brings to the table.
The portal also helps users in complex scenarios like job transitions. In such cases, the users receive multiple form 16 so that the Clear software can help them accommodate the changes too. Say, for example, if one has forgotten to claim HRA, then it will take care of that as well.
On the same grounds, the customer can apply for tax refunds, and calculate capital gain/loss if the user has sold stocks or MFs. Cleartax services help them carry forward losses to multiple years, incorporate companies, and also undertake service tax registrations easily, and efficiently.
NIL GST Return Filling
ClearTax has launched the all-new NIL GST Return Filling feature in December 2019. This will help the users including CAs and businesses file their NIL GST Returns without any hassles. Around 20 lakh MSMEs and other small businesses file GSTs each month, here a simple filling process in place would certainly make things really easy for them.
To start filling their NIL GST Return, all that the user has to do is download ClearTax GST Desktop App. After it is installed, ClearTax GST Desktop App will help them file GSTR-1 and GSTR-3B seamlessly and in simple and easy steps. Thus, a taxpayer can avoid all unnecessary interactions with any other portal because they will get everything available on the ClearTax GST software including the submission of returns. Thus, the users can file GSTR-1 with minimal manual effort and directly on ClearTax, which will be supported by both Digital Signature Certificate (DSC) and Electronic Verification Code (EVC). It automates the entire process, making it 3X faster, thereby saving ample time. The ‘Nil return filing’ feature that ClearTax announced back in 2019, comes with important validations and a cautionary window too, which allows the users to reconsider their filing of GST returns with no data. This will stop users from erroneously submitting a Nil return that otherwise was not one.
Cleartax, after being rebranded to Clear, has also included:
Cleartax GST – An all-in-one GST toolkit that is designed to simplify the GST filing.
ClearE-invoicing – A trustworthy e-invoicing solution that enables the users in bulk invoicing.
ClearServices – An expert consultation service to help the users identify their problems and attain their solutions.
Some of the main products of Clear include:
Enterprise Products – Cleartax GST, E-invoicing, Max-ITC, E-way bill and more.
ITR Filing – Cleartax tax filing feature allows the customers to file ITR within 3 minutes or helps them to file their ITR by Clear experts.
ClearOne – Via ClearOne, Clear offers invoicing and payment solutions for businesses.
Cleartax has announced that it will partner with crypto exchanges to help users manage their crypto portfolio effortlessly. As soon as the government announced a 30% tax rate and a 1% deduction at source for gains and transfers via virtual currency, ClearTax rushed to declare that it will aid the users in managing their current cryptocurrency portfolio and taxes. Founder and CEO of Clear, Archit Gupta mentioned that this particular offering was in the works for some time now and this makes ClearTax the first platform in India that offers this solution.
Clear Products and Services
ClearTax – Founders & Team
ClearTax founders are Archit Gupta, Srivatsan Chari, and Ankit Solanki who were friends before starting the company.
Ankit, Archit, and Srivatsan | Founder, Cleartax
Archit Gupta
Archit Gupta is the founder and the current Clear CEO. Before setting up ClearTax, he worked at Data Domain Inc., which was acquired by EMC2. The ClearTax owner holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from IIT Guwahati and a Master’s in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This ClearTax founder worked in Silicon Valley for three years, and this is when he was exposed to the startup culture in the valley. He was pursuing a Ph.D. degree when he decided to drop the program and eventually founded Clear.
Srivatsan Chari
He is the Co-founder of ClearTax. This ClearTax founder did his Bachelor’s in Computer Science (Hons) from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani.
Ankit Solanki
He is the Co-Founder of ClearTax. ClearTax founder holds a bachelor’s degree in Information Technology from the S.I.E.S. Graduate School of Technology.
Ravi Sandepudi
Ravi Sandepudi is ClearTax’s ‘Entrepreneur-in-Residence’. He is an alumnus of BITS-Pilani and The Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania). Prior to being appointed as Clear’s entrepreneur-in-residence, he was associated with PayPal, Google, and Simility.
Clear has an employee strength of somewhere between 1001-5000 employees, as per their Linkedin profile.
During his master’s and later years, Archit was living in San Francisco and used to visit home during the summers. The Cleartax journey started during one of his visits, in 2010, when he happened to have an informal talk with his father, a Chartered Accountant in Delhi. The conversation was about how doing taxes was a tedious and difficult task for both the individual consumers and CAs. Furthermore, they also discussed how the available computing software makes tax filing so problematic and complex leading to the genesis of the idea that the whole process is time-consuming and hectic.
Within no time, Archit started fixating on the problem and started thinking to himself that it’d be great if he could figure out a way to create software for India to help ease the tax filing process. And in the following months, he moved to India to solve this problem.
There were multiple layers of complexity to this problem and it wasn’t easy as it seemed from the top. Since he was from a computer science background, tax and finances seemed to be something new to deal with, and hence, it took him a while to get used to the rules of the game. It required Archit to spend a lot of time with the CAs, put together a lot of learning, understanding, and get deeper insights into the industry. It was like starting from scratch for Archit, but ultimately Clear was born.
“When I started thinking about ClearTax, I was not thinking what the market would be or how big it would be. All I thought was it was a need that should be solved.” said Archit Gupta, owner of ClearTax.
ClearTax – Startup Launch
“I had no marketing budget at that time. So all I did was send emails to friends or people I knew to try the product. But within two hours of the website going live, somebody had filed a tax return. That was a crazy moment for us.” said Archit Gupta, ClearTax CEO.
And that’s how he launched the ClearTax company. From that moment onwards, there was no looking back for Cleartax. In the coming 11 days after the launch of ClearTax services, more than 1,000 people came to the site to file their tax returns on the portal. The founder and the core team were on the edge all the time and kept working day and night to keep adding feature after feature at breakneck speeds as and when the consumers would call up and ask for more support features. Some of the examples of added features on consumer demand are rental income or provision for two salaries.
In the year following the inception of the company, Cleartax had witnessed more than 30K-40K users filing their returns on the platform. The figures kept jumping from 100K to 300K, to 1 million, five years down the lane. From San Francisco to Delhi and from a cushy academic career to an entrepreneur, it’s been quite a journey for Archit Gupta.
Clear goes by the tagline “Save money. Save time,” which rightly represents its motto because it aims to simplify finances, save money and time for millions of Indian businesses and people. The ClearTax logo was a smiling robot along with ClearTax written in Black colour before it was rebranded to ‘Clear’.
The current logo of the brand simply has the word clear, followed by “from makers of ClearTax”, to hint at the previous name of Clear, which the company is famous as!
Clear Logo
ClearTax – Business and Revenue Model
ClearTax operates on the B2C, B2B, and B2G models. The company is known to charge its customers for filing. The ClearTax Revenue model is self-e-filing-based, while it operates on a freemium model. ClearTax has a Chartered Accountant-assisted service for filing individual tax returns. The company has a concierge-like service for NRI tax returns through which ClearTax’s revenue comes from.
Its services and the Cleartax Business model are designed especially for freelancers and small businesses. The clear Business model helps these freelancers and businesses plan their expenses and claim them systematically, and this way, the company helps them save much more on their taxes than it charges.
The Clear income tax returns (ITR) filing feature, which was free of cost, has now been declared as chargeable, after 10 years of being a free service. This feature would now charge a nominal fee from the users, effective from May 2022. Such a facility would also be included now among the revenue drivers of Clear from the next fiscal year onwards.
Clear has successfully raised around $140.3 million in funding over 7 rounds. Clear raised its Venture Round on January 13, 2022, where it raised an undisclosed amount. The previous funding round that Clear raised was via a Series C round, which was raised on October 25, 2021, where the company raised around $75 million from its lead investors like Kora Capital, Stripe, Alua Capital, and others.
The new funding that Cleartax has received will be used to fuel the company’s expansion into the B2B credit and payments space and into the international markets, as per the company’s statement in a recent press release.
Founders Fund, Elevation Capital, Sequoia Capital, SAIF Partners, Composite Capital Management, Tiger Global, and Stripe are some of the lead investors of Clear.
Here is a list of all the funding rounds of ClearTax:
Date
Stage
Amount
Investors
January 13, 2022
Venture Round
–
–
October 25, 2021
Series C
$75 mn
Kora Capital, Stripe and others
October 23, 2018
Series B
$50 mn
Composite Capital Management
June 17, 2016
Series A
$12 mn
SAIF Partners
May 25, 2016
Seed Round
$2 mn
Founders Fund, Sequoia Capital
April 26, 2016
Angel Round
$1.3 mn
Max Levchin, Scott Banister
August 19, 2014
Pre Seed Round
–
Sumon Sadhu
ClearTax – Growth and Revenue
ClearTax revenue was recorded at Rs 60 crore in FY20, a 163% surge over the previous year’s (FY19) Rs 22.8 crore.
Here are some of the key growth highlights of the Clear:
The company claims to process around $300 billion worth of B2B invoices annually
Clear claims to save more than Rs 1000 crore for the Indian businesses each year
Clear boasts of a 50 million+ e-invoices run rate
The company has saved over 1.8 million man-hours to date
ClearTax is featured in the World’s 250 Most Promising Fintech Startups by CB Insights. There are 2,174 fintech startups in India according to a recent MEDICI Global Report
As mentioned above, Archit had to start from scratch about anything and everything about tax filing and returns which were the initial challenges that the founder had to face. Secondly, Archit had to opt for bootstrapping because back then, the capital was very difficult to raise. Given that, he also had a very big challenge on hand, which was to build a product software company based out of India with almost no precedents to look up to in the field.
ClearTax – Acquisitions
ClearTax has acquired 6 organizations to date. Clear acquired CimplyFive in an all-cash deal for an undisclosed amount on July 5, 2022. CimplyFive, which is a cloud-hosted application that helps automate company laws and SEBI Listing Obligations and Disclosure Requirements (LODR) compliance, will help Clear with compliance risk management software that will help the enterprise customers of Clear eliminate numerous procedural non-compliance that occurs. After the acquisition, as per the deal, the CimplyFive team and founder will function as an independent platform.
Xpedize was the previous company that (ClearTax) Clear acquired on March 16, 2022, for an undisclosed amount. Before that, Clear acquired yBANQ on July 7, 2021, in a cash and stock deal with which it forayed into the B2B payments space. Here’s a look at the Clear acquisitions:
Cleartax has competitors in individual services that it caters to. H&R Block and Webtel are the significant competitors in the tax filing space that ClearTax directly competes with. When it comes to the GST space, the startup directly or indirectly competes with Cygnet, Tally, and Computex. Its mutual fund platform competes with entities like:
By stepping its foot into stockbroking and wealth management services via ‘Black App’, ClearTax has further expanded its list of competitors in India to include:
As ClearTax assumed this journey, they have kept on adding mentors and Investors like Max Levchin, founder of Paypal, Vijay Shekhar Sharma of Paytm, Neeraj Arora of Whatsapp, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Sequoia, and Ryan Peterson of Flexport.
Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by Mudrex.
A rapidly growing sector of the larger financial technology (fintech) business is the cryptocurrency market. In order to enable secure and open transactions, the cryptocurrency sector makes use of digital currencies, blockchain technology, and decentralized financial systems. Companies like Mudrex are at the forefront of offering cutting-edge investing solutions in the cryptocurrency industry as demand for investment solutions for cryptocurrencies keeps rising.
Mudrex is a Global Crypto Investment Platform backed by Y Combinator and Nexus Venture Partners that operates in over 100 countries globally. It is a US-headquartered and Bengaluru-based fintech startup aiming to be the largest asset management platform for crypto investments. The company has $3 billion in trade volume, $20 million+ in assets under management, and 7,00,000+ investors.
StartupTalky interviewed Mr. Edul Patel (Co-founder & CEO, Mudrex) to get insights into the startup story and roadmap of the organization.
Mudrex – Company Highlights
Startup Name
Mudrex
Founders
Edul Patel (CEO), Prince Arora (VP, Engineering), Rohit Goyal (VP, DeFi), and Alankar Saxena (CTO).
Mudrex is a revolutionary cryptocurrency investment platform that empowers individuals and institutions to invest confidently in digital assets. With state-of-the-art technology and expert insights, Mudrex provides a secure environment to manage crypto investments. Their ultimate goal is to help clients achieve financial goals and become the go-to platform for crypto investing.
Products Offered by Mudrex
Mudrex Portfolio: The idea behind the product is to democratize access to investment opportunities in financial markets for investors. This product will provide access to sharp and insightful trading strategies that were earlier available only to high-net-worth individuals. The product is created to make an easy-to-follow process for cryptocurrency investments. The platform builds a portfolio bundle using top-performing algorithms for different risk-reward profiles. An investor starts with choosing a portfolio based on their risk-reward expectations. It then offers trading strategies and products that are most suited to their risk profile.
Mudrex Coin Sets: Mudrex Coin Sets are baskets of crypto tokens that will help users generate good returns in the long term. These crypto baskets are automatically managed and re-balanced periodically to ensure that they are improved as the market changes. Coin Sets is one such product that will allow investors to mitigate risk by diversifying investment in cryptocurrencies. It is a mutual fund-like product with a better risk-reward ratio. The product is designed to expand retail participation in crypto investment, curated suitably for investors who look at crypto investments as long-term wealth creation. Coin Sets boast of over 90% month-on-month retention rate.
USP of Mudrex
Being a holistic destination for all crypto investment requirements remains its biggest USP. Unlike other cryptocurrency exchanges in India, the Mudrex platform is hassle-free, easy to use, and equally supports trading and investing communities to test out strategies and grow wealth consistently.
Another major differentiator is the no coder feature offered to seasoned traders. This was introduced as the team realized that global exchanges that are open 24*7 do not provide accessible tools and proper infrastructure to trade. On the other hand, only 1-2% of the retail investor base holds the knowledge of crypto trading, hence Mudrex is trying to spread awareness and educate them on crypto as an asset.
Mudrex – Industry Details
The startup did extensive research to find out the market size for one of the most rapidly expanding industries in the world. Different sources point out that by 2025 the crypto asset management industry would be clocking more than $12.5 Billion per year. Mudrex’s growth estimates suggest that it will be able to scale up to capture 1% of that market share.
During the ideation phase of Mudrex, the team reached out to approximately 200 users experienced in the crypto space. They got a unanimous response stating that automating trading in cryptocurrencies was a revolutionary move. They then closely monitored the interaction with these users to understand their pain points. The founders & the entire team worked very hard to create a product that solves this unique problem. Apart from these 200 people, they reached out to various Discord communities to receive feedback and constantly improve the product and the user experience.
They figured that trading in the crypto market which remains open 24*7 was significantly different from trading in the stock markets. The team initially built Mudrex with the idea to make money for themselves. When they started building Mudrex in Oct 2018, the founders just wanted to solve their own problems. Automating trading was hard, finding quality strategies and signal providers was difficult, and the crypto world was filled with scams. They wanted to build a trustworthy, reliable, and scalable platform that just works and helps them grow their money.
2 years from that point, in Oct 2020, Mudrex made its first investment from the company’s books. The team paper traded for 6 months, ran countless backtests, and detailed risk analysis. After all, this was the company’s money, not something they could just afford to play with.
Mudrex – Founders and Team
Mudrex is a team of four co-founders from IIT Bombay and IIT Kanpur – Edul Patel (CEO), Prince Arora (VP, Engineering), Rohit Goyal (VP, DeFi), and Alankar Saxena (CTO).
Mudrex Founders
Edul Patel
Talking about Edul Patel’s background, he has over 10 years of deep-rooted experience in finance, entrepreneurship, and building tech-driven applications. His domain expertise lies in product and & risk management. Edul graduated from IIT Bombay in 2011, post that he went to Deutsche Bank and worked there for a couple of years in trading and investing. He left Deutsche Bank in 2013 to start his own company called Niffler.
Prince Arora
At Deutsche, Edul met Prince Arora (Vice President, Engineering) who was his CTO at Niffler, a tech lead in his next company, and now Co-Founder of Mudrex. ‘Nifler’- a $1 Million funded startup by SAIF partner (that eventually got acquired by Tapzo. Edul became the head of product at Tapzo, and it eventually got acquired by Amazon, and he didn’t want to go to Amazon. So Prince and Edul both left Tapzo and started working on Mudrex. They started doing this in September 2017.
Rohit Goyal
In September 2017. The duo got their third co-founder, Rohit Goyal (Vice President, DeFi). Edul has known him for the last 15 years now. He was a junior at IIT Bombay. Post IIT, he started his own company called Saabziwaala.com, which was acquired by Big Basket. After that, he started working on his own gaming company and created multiple casual games for over three years. After that, he came to Bangalore, started staying with Edul, and saw how interesting it was to work on Crypto.
Alankar Saxena
Mudrex’s fourth co-founder is Alankar Saxena (CTO) who was four years junior to Edul at IIT Bombay. He started his career at Twitter, and worked on personalization and scaling and Twitter security as well. He came back and started working at a credit lending startup, very quickly realizing that credit lending in India is an Operations problem and not a tech problem to solve. He joined Mudrex eventually.
Now Mudrex is a team of 25 to 30 people, about 70% to 80% are ex-IIT, Ex-NIT, Ex-BITS, Ex-Google, Ex- Microsoft and 60% are ex-founders who have built and sold their businesses to other companies in the past. So, Mudrex has a strong entrepreneurial team.
Mudrex’s mission revolves around bringing “risk optimised high yield investments to everyone.”
Mudrex’s long-term vision
Mudrex aims to become a one-stop solution for crypto investment needs. It will achieve this by expanding the user community, and providing superior tools to advanced portfolio managers.
Mudrex’s Short-term vision
On an immediate basis, its vision is to improve accessibility to crypto investment for retail investors. Hence, the team will soon launch the Mudrex application and introduce tools to ease the process. Simultaneously intend to educate and debunk myths around crypto investing for beginners and novice investors in the space to accelerate the process.
Mudrex – Name, Tagline and Logo
‘Mudrex’ comes from the amalgamation of the Mudra exchange. Mudra refers to tokens, and therefore the name implies an exchange to trade tokens.
The tagline of Mudrex is ‘simplifying investing.’ The founders knew that trading cryptocurrencies were cumbersome, and simplifying the process was their unique proposition.
Mudrex Logo
Mudrex – Startup Launch
Mudrex started by having extensive one on one conversations with different sets of people through Twitter and Discord communities. It reached out to close to 2000 such people to land its first set of 100 users.
Mudrex’s primary strategy while going from 100 to 10000 was scaling up its various online communities. The team followed this up with a referral campaign. As they started growing, the startup entered into partnerships with various influencers.
Mudrex – Growth
On average, Mudrex is at revenue growth of 100% month on month. It currently stands at over 50.000+ registered users and has clocked over 450% user growth in 4 months. Mudrex currently has a user base of 100,000 users from over 100 countries. Mudrex has assets under management amounting to $15 million (as of October 2021).
Mudrex – Mentor/Advisors
Mudrex is fortunate to have advisors such as Nexus Venture Partners, Village Global, and other VCs such as Kunal Shah, Anand Chandrashekharan, and Anjali Bansal.
Mudrex has transitioned itself into an investing platform for the cryptocurrency market. Some of the international competitors are BlockFi, Celsius, Nexo, etc.
Mudrex – Funding and Investors
Mudrex has raised a Pre-series A funding round on February 8, 2022, which came from Arkam Ventures, Tribe Capital and Bolt by QED Investors. With this funding round Mudrex aims to boost user acquisition, licensing and looks up to a quick expansion in geographies like India, the US, Europe and Latin America.
This came after 4 months since Mudrex last raised $2.5 mn from Nexus Ventures in August 2021.
Mudrex’s funding details are as follows:
Date
Stage
Amount
Investors
February 8, 2022
Pre-Series A
$6.5 mn
Tribe, Arkam and Bolt
Aug 10, 2021
Seed
$2.5 Mn
Nexus Venture Partners with participation from Village
September 1, 2020
Pre-Seed Round
$250K
–
March 18, 2019
Seed Round
$500k
Y Combinator, Better Capital
“With the funds raised, we will be looking to perfect our existing products and introduce tools for simplifying the investing journey of investors. Furthermore, the capital will be utilized to expand the team globally and establish Mudrex as a leading crypto investment platform” – says Edul Patel, Co-founder & CEO, Mudrex.
Mudrex – Challenges Faced
Mudrex was started as a cryptocurrency exchange for India. The biggest challenge they faced was right before the launch of the platform in 2018. But just before going live, the RBI’s single unilateral decision robbed Mudrex of its entire market. On 8th April, the RBI decided to ban crypto trading in India which led to a massive setback for Mudrex. The team realized that an exchange is highly commoditized and the actual value is the investing part. They wanted to serve a global audience, hence turning the setback into an opportunity. Years later they launched Mudrex as a crypto investment platform.
Mudrex – Business Model & Revenue Model
Mudrex operates in a B2B2C business model. In Mudrex, there is a fee for different algorithms that you choose to invest with. The starting fee is as low as 1%-2% on average per month for investing in these products. And typically users see 7%-8% on their returns.
1. Mudrex Exchange – Build Mudrex’s retail-focused property. The team is building a full-fledged end-to-end crypto trading and investing platform. Users will be able to buy crypto from fiat, store it, trade it and invest it. They are working on a mobile app as well
2. Mudrex Capital focused on institutions – Provide bespoke services to 250k USD> clients. Institutional investors focused on the asset management desk providing bespoke products to HNIs, Funds, and institutions. The minimum check size for this is 250k. Mudrex will be advancing this desk to start providing services to others
3. Investment as a service
Working with liquidity gatekeepers as channel partners
Provide investment options directly to exchanges, wallets, and liquidity sources as a service to let their users invest
Five global integrations with exchanges across confirmed, there are 13 more in the pipeline.
4. ‘Shopify For traders’
Work with product gatekeepers as channel partners.
Repackage the Mudrex billing, subscription, and payments infrastructure in a service that traders use to run their own subscription business and community.
The pilot is already running. The product will go live soon this year
5. Products based on Mutual funds like layer
Mudrex is planning to launch a Crypto product based on themes in the upcoming weeks
The product modeled on the lines of ETFs/Mutual Fund will help users to participate in crypto retail
6. Team Expansion – Mudrex recently raised $2.5 million from Nexus Venture Partners as part of its seed round. The funds will be used to expand the company’s personnel and operations, as well as develop new products that meet global regulatory requirements.
Mudrex – FAQs
What is Mudrex?
Mudrex is a Global Crypto Investment Platform. It deals in 2 Products – Mudrex Portfolio & Mudrex Coin Sets. The former democratizes access to investment opportunities in financial markets for investors and offers trading strategies that best suit the risk profile. Whereas Mudrex Coin Sets are baskets of crypto tokens that will help users generate good returns in the long term.
Who are the founders of Mudrex?
Mudrex is a team of four co-founders from IIT Bombay and IIT Kanpur – Edul Patel (CEO), Prince Arora (VP, Engineering), Rohit Goyal (VP, DeFi), and Alankar Saxena (CTO).
How does Mudrex make money?
In Mudrex, there is a fee for different algorithms that you choose to invest with. The starting fee is as low as 1%-2% on average per month for investing in these products. And typically users see 7%-8% on their returns.
Is Mudrex an Indian Company?
Mudrex is a US-headquartered and Bengaluru-based fintech startup.
What is Mudrex’s USP?
Being a holistic destination for all crypto investment requirements remains Mudrex’s biggest USP. Another major differentiator is theno coder feature offered to seasoned traders. This was introduced as the team realized that global exchanges that are open 24*7 do not provide accessible tools and proper infrastructure to trade.
Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by Takeoff.
Investment is all about making your future a better place. It is for the financial security of their capital that one can enjoy in the future. When a person makes an investment, it is to ensure that they get to earn higher returns. Investing in mutual funds goal is not any different.
Mutual funds are a form of investment if people are able to understand it clearly. Now, individuals are able to invest on their own in mutual funds. For non-individuals like businesses, trusts, and others, Takeoff has taken responsibility since 2020. It is India’s first online mutual fund distribution platform for non-individuals.
StartupTalky brings all about Takeoff, the platform, its Startup Story, Founders and Team, Name, Tagline and Logo, Funding and Investors, Business Model and Revenue Model, Challenges, Competitors, Awards and Achievements, and more in the article ahead!
The service that Takeoff mainly provides is mutual fund distribution. The main USP is that the entire process is online and condensed from 30 days to 1 day. Companies can now have the luxury to choose from all the schemes from all the AMCs through an easy-to-access platform. They have 24×7 access and the support team is always just a call away.
Takeoff also provides KYC services for non-individual clients like businesses, trusts, government bodies etc. Gone are the days when one has to send mountains of documents to the AMCs and has to suffer the two months of hassle while their KYC was being processed. The Takeoff team takes only minimal documents and gets the KYC processed within just 7-10 working days.
The mutual fund industry has witnessed a growth of 30.82% from 2020 to 2021 with Rs. 26.07 trillion AUM (Assets under Management) in 2020 to Rs. 34.10 trillion AUM in 2021.
Split of investor accounts:
The total number of investor accounts of Takeoff as of March 21 was 9,78,65,529, from which 7,91,859 (0.81%) is Institutional investor accounts and 9,70,73,670 (99.19%) are Retail and HNI investor accounts.
Split of industry assets:
The Total industry assets of Takeoff as of June 21 is Rs. 34,10,403 crore, from which Retail investor assets is Rs. 18,33,568 crore and Institutional investor accounts are Rs. 15,76,835 crores.
Takeoff – Founders and Team
Prasad R. Lendwe – Founder of Takeoff
Takeoff is founded by Prasad R. Lendwe, an Electrical Engineer. He is an MBA droupout from Kalina University, Mumbai. Apart from being the founder of Takeoff, he runs a Finance based YouTube channel, Convey by Finnovationz as well and has more than 1.8 M Subscribers.
The current size of the Takeoff team is 15-18 members. The work culture in Takeoff is very relaxed and informal. They believe in working hard and playing harder. It basically means, during office hours, one can find them hunched over their laptops. During lunch, however, the team can be found engaging in spirited table tennis tournaments and other games.
Takeoff – Startup Story
Before starting Takeoff, the company was focused on their Youtube channel Convey by FinnovationZ. Through this channel, they were able to spread financial awareness for the past 6 years.
In Jan 2020, they decided to take some of their own advice and tried to invest on behalf of their company. There are some surplus in the current account and the fact that they are earning 0% interest on it bothered them a lot. After using platforms like Zerodha and Groww in the past, it was wrongly assumed that the process would be just as easy.
It was only after the actual process started, they realised how difficult it is in reality. As there was no dedicated platform working towards the mutual fund investment needs of non-individualism, the idea of the formation of Takeoff first came into their mind.
Takeoff – Mission and Vision
Takeoff’s short-term vision is to spread awareness and encourage more non-individuals to begin their mutual fund investment journey. They intend on doing this by providing top-quality service and exploiting their first-mover advantage.
Their long-term vision is to emerge as a complete investment solution for non-individuals and to become a one-stop destination for any kind of investment that companies and other non-individuals want to indulge in.
The core belief is centred on the fact that non-individuals, whether its companies, trusts, proprietors, or any of the others, deserve the same facilities and the same ease that individuals do. In the past few years, thousands of platforms have cropped up for retail investors, but companies have, sadly, been left out. It is Takeoff intention to right this wrong and fixes the imbalance.
Takeoff – Name, Tagline, and Logo
Takeoff logo
Takeoff Fintech Pvt. Ltd. is the officially registered name of the company.
Takeoff is working on a distribution model. The platform is currently free to use for all of their clients and it will always be free to use. Any non-individual can register and open accounts in Takeoff. No amount is charged from the clients. The revenue comes from the AMC (Asset management company). A fixed brokerage amount is paid for each AMC.
Takeoff – Challenges Faced
The lack of awareness among the non-individuals in India that they too can invest in mutual funds on behalf of their organization is the most challenging part of Takeoff. The conversion is not easy from a lead to an active investor, as the company has to explain the whole product and the industry at the same time over a very short span of time to their clients.
Takeoff – Growth
The journey from 0 to 100 Clients
The journey was of severe ups and downs, like a roller coaster. Takeoff got their first client in December 2020 on their beta version and after some infertile months, the platform started gaining recognition, through several marketing campaigns. Currently, they have over 550 registered users and the company is experiencing slow but steady growth, they believe in value over volume.
Customer Retention
Takeoff believes that the best customer retention can be achieved only through superior customer service. Investments are a fairly complicated process, even if one makes it seems as easy as possible, clients will still have doubts. It is very important to make the clients feel as though the company is with them at each step along the way, in case they encounter any kinds of difficulties. This process has helped Takeoff in retaining its clients.
Takeoff – Advertisements and Social Media Campaigns
Takeoff has tried various platforms and a plethora of campaigns to generate leads and convert them to active investors. LinkedIn ads and their own Convey YouTube channel have been proved a constant success for the company. The company is looking forward to more events and other activities so that they can reach out to the target audience and make the platform enriched with the soul vision of the company.
Takeoff – Future Plans
The company is doing quite well. It has started to make a name for itself and is experiencing a steady inflow of clients in future. Both their client base and the AUM have started to increase.
Takeoff is India’s first online mutual fund distribution platform for non-individuals. They help non-individuals like companies, government bodies etc to invest in mutual funds.
In the financial services sector, insurance is always an area that seems like quicksand for the people who lack proper knowledge. Besides, the insurance sector is one that has always been devoid of proper, credible advisors who would steer their clients to fortify their future. This is where the digital insurance advisory platforms are proven to be a huge boon. Ditto is one of the latest online insurance advisory platforms that was founded by the co-founders of Finshots in February 2021.
Ditto Insurance has been headquartered in Bengaluru and has already raised Rs 4 crore from Zerodha in an initial funding round, the latter also picked up a majority stake in it. With Ditto, the founders hope to reiterate the success they gained with Finshots, which was launched in 2019 and already boasts of a subscription of over 5 lakh readers.
So, let’s check out Ditto, its Founders and Team, Funding and Investors, Challenges, Future Plans, Products and Services, Name, Tagline and Logo, Startup Story, and more.
Finshots (The parent company of Ditto Insurance) is a 3-minute daily newsletter giving readers insights about all things economics and finance. Their vision is to create financial literacy among Indians by simplifying finance and financial products.
The core belief of Finshots is that financial literacy is like basic arithmetic every person should know. Everyone should understand what’s happening with the economy, or what’s going on behind a financial scam – but the news is often full of technical jargon, making it obscure to the layperson. Hence, their main aim is to simplify finance for everyone and give trustworthy information that people can rely on.
Ditto – Industry
Finshots caters to the Fintech industry. They don’t have a target market for Finshots. They want to build an inclusive community of people willing to learn and understand financial concepts. On the other hand, for Ditto, their target market is the working population looking for insurance for themselves and their loved ones.
Finshots currently has a user base of over 700K readers, while Ditto has helped more than 10,000+ people with their insurance queries.
The fintech industry has massive scope, since investments, as well as insurance penetration, is severely lacking in the country. Only close to 2-3% of Indians have invested in equities, and insurance penetration is a meagre 3%. So the scope for growth in the industry is immense.
Ditto – Starting Up
After completing their MBA course, Bhanu Gurram, Shrehith Karkera and Pawan Kumar Rai founded Finception in 2018. Lokesh Gurram, an IIT Delhi graduate, worked for Samsung in South Korea for two years before joining the venture.
They saw that financial news from major media houses was loaded with industry-specific terminology, as though it wasn’t intended for the masses. And so, Finception delivered explanatory long-form stories for a year. The objective was clear: To simplify financial news for the masses.
In 2019, a separate brand called Finshots came about when the team realized that audiences suffered from information overload.
Finshots delivers only one news a day. Readers spend just three minutes each day but in a month, they would have read about 28 topics.
Finshots doesn’t spend a dime on advertising. Finshots’s subscriber base has grown to 500,000 just by the word of mouth. While Finshots educates people about the financial markets, readers are still left asking which financial product is best-suited to their needs.
Then they launched Ditto, the latest product under the Finshots brand aimed at simplifying insurance policies for people. This is one of the many ways Finshots intends to simplify financial products and financial planning for the masses.
Finshots is a financial newsletter that one can read in no longer than 3 minutes. They also have a podcast that covers the same content as their newsletter. Their product tries to resolve the problem of lack of financial literacy among people by offering information in plain, simple, lucid English, which is their USP.
They started Finshots back in 2019 when they realised people wanted finance content simplified and this was a market gap they wanted to fill. They later launched Ditto Insurance, their latest venture which provides insurance advice. Ditto aims to help millennials make better financial decisions and they’ve started with insurance. They want to make a dent in the insurance industry by educating the masses so that people can compare policies, narrow down their choices per their requirements, avoid pitfalls and buy the policy best suited for them.
Ditto – Founders and Team
Ditto Founders
At IIMA, Bhanu, Shrehith Karkera and Pawan Kumar Rai were batchmates. At the time, Rai was working on a way to simplify stock markets for millennials. They say that millennials must be helped traversing these jargon minefields.
The founders were also a part of IIM Ahmedabad’s IIMAvericks program which gave them a monthly stipend. Nevertheless, Karkera taught part-time classes at coaching institutes like T.I.M.E. and Career Launcher, so Finshots could hire more interns and grow.
Shrehith handles most of Finshots content, while Bhanu & Pawan handle marketing and sales. Lokesh manages product and tech.
Finshots have over 80 employees at present, working from home. But they try to create a work environment that makes everyone feel like they’re having fun in what they’re doing, rather than being crippled with piles of work. They also organise monthly activities to keep up team spirit.
When it comes to hiring, they look more at the enthusiasm and work ethics an incoming employee brings to the team, rather than their background and resume.
Ditto – Name, Tagline, and Logo
Ditto Logo
The idea of Finshots is ‘financial shots’ – think of it like coffee shots you take in the morning. That’s exactly how they want people to consume financial information, one shot at a time.
“Our philosophy behind naming our insurance advisory as ‘Ditto’ is that we want to tell people what kind of policy we would buy if we were in their shoes. We want to tell them exactly what we would do, and they can then make a decision based on that. “
Ditto – Business Model and Revenue model
Finshots is completely free and they don’t intend to make any revenue off of it.
“That’s part of the mission behind Finshots – we want to democratise financial information, offering our content for free is part of it. “
Ditto, on the other hand, earns money through policy sales. They function as a distributor and help people with purchasing policies.
Ditto – Challenges Faced
The biggest challenge faced by Ditto was the fact that insurance is a push product. The industry practices include mis-selling policies and spam calling. The founders believe that a product like insurance has the power to make or break the financial strength of households and that’s why their approach towards insurance is to research, give the right advice, and simultaneously ensure peace of mind to families.
On the other hand, the biggest challenge for Finshots was expanding the reach of the newsletter. It’s definitely not easy to make lakhs of people subscribe to and read your content on a regular basis. And there aren’t any viral marketing shortcuts here. So they mostly relied on good-old word of mouth marketing, social media and college partnerships. They sent college newsletters to students and got their first 1000 readers.
Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by MissCallPay.
MissCallPay aims to provide UPI-based payment solutions for the Bharat population or Non-tech savvy people using feature phones. Founded by Mitesh Thakker, MissCallPay has introduced voice-based payment solutions using the mechanism of ‘Miss Call’. The startup is expecting to commercialize the launch in December 2021 and is already in talks with banks to launch the 1st voice-based payment solution for their customers.
StartupTalky interviewed Mr. Mitesh Thakker (Founder, MissCallPay) to get insights into the startup story and roadmap of the organization. Know how MissCall was started, its funding details challenges faced, future plans, and more.
MissCallPay is a fintech startup providing a payment solution based on UPI for the Bharat population or Non-tech savvy people using feature phones. It is a pioneer in bringing voice-based payment solutions and aims to bring banking & financial services to all the strata of society. This payment platform would enable Indians to go cashless thus making mobile payments simpler for the masses who are digitally not tech-savvy.
“We aim to bring convenience & ease of use to all the users whether they are not digitally literate or bandwidth is slow or using feature phones. This product is for everyone” – Mitesh Thakker, Founder, MissCallPay.
The team has designed a payment solution simply keeping in mind the feature phone users and Non-tech savvy people using simply a MISS CALL which is a known habit to entire masses in Bharat. One needs to give a missed call to a merchant-specific number to initiate a transaction, post which user get a call back to confirm the Merchant Name and amount over voice call in their local language and once they confirm the transaction by inputting their UPI PIN for their Bank account linked with UPI the transaction is processed and SMS Notification is sent to both payer and payee.
MissCallPay – Industry/Market Details
From relevant government sources –
India has 117.6 cr wireless subscribers but only less than 20 crore use UPI. Thus, close to 97 crores, people are still to adopt digital payments.
Nearly 96 % of Indian villages (5.72 lakhs out of 5.97 lakhs villages have mobile /network connectivity with over 500 million (50 crores) using feature phones.
Thus, there is a very big wide untapped market with unique opportunities for Misscallpay to serve the close to a billion underserved population.
Voice payment technology is transforming the FinTech industry. The global voice payment market size reached USD 19.87 Billion in 2020 and is expected to register a revenue CAGR of 9.8%, during the forecast period, according to the latest analysis by Emergen Research. The Asia Pacific is expected to account for the largest revenue share than other regional markets over the forecast period owing to increasing demand for voice-enabled consumer electronics products including smartphones, laptops, smartwatches, and laptops in countries in the region.
Mitesh got the inspiration to start MissCallPay, when he was attending a vibrant Gujarat Summit, listening to the motivational speech of PM Modi that deliberated startups to innovate and think of what problems they can solve for the population. Moreover, during demonetization, he saw how people were facing problems in terms of cash. Being an innovator, his mind was full of ideas and when Mitesh heard PM’s speech, he decided on a product aiming for making India cashless thus benefiting the entire population. Thus, he took a plunge into the fintech space. He realized that financial inclusion without a payment solution that works without the Internet, smartphones are going to be a challenge in India, but he worked on the product using awarded patents and thus MissCallPay was born. Mitesh then started building the MissCallPay prototype product.
It was around this time, the founder began participating in various startup challenges. One of them was IIGP 2.0, a Social Impact Innovation Challenge organized by FICCI and supported by Tata Trusts, Lockheed Martin, CIIE, IIM-Ahmedabad, IIT-Bombay, MIT-USA, and DST, the Government of India. Mitesh was short-listed as a Top-50 Finalist for social impact innovations at IIGP 2018. There was no looking back as he won Fintegrate Zone F50 2018 and Maharashtra Startup Week 2019.
Despite winning numerous awards, there were many hurdles to make Misscallpay a reality. One among them was not fulfilling the minimum net worth requirement for RBI Regulatory Sandbox for feature payment. Thus, he started exploring African markets, then he came across Bill Gates’ Grand Challenge announcement for Feature phone payments with 1 lakh US Dollars Prize money for 3 winners. This participation gave a ray of hope and a huge but final opportunity to make MissCallPay idea see the light of the day in India.
The Bill Gates Grand Challenge was highly competitive as over 750 Global Innovations were vying for this prestigious award and pilot opportunity in the world’s largest market for feature phones. Mitesh won this challenge defeating 750 global contestants to pilot a Feature phone and voice-based Payment solution in India. This grant which he received helped sustain the business operations, and the pilot got him running and building a solid team. After months of making the scalable product and getting the certifications done.
“We are expecting to commercialize the launch next month (Dec’21) and are already in talks with banks to launch our 1st voice-based payment solution for their customers” – Mitesh added.
MissCallPay – Ideology behind the name
Miss Call is known to everyone including the Bharat population. So the team wanted to introduce a payment solution that adapts to the habits of the masses. Thus by the name “MissCallPay”, the startup wanted to resonate with this population.
MissCallPay Logo
MissCallPay – Founder
Mitesh Thakker is the founder of MissCallPay and has over 21 years of experience selling, marketing, and building IT products in startup environments. Moreover, he has six patents to his credit. Mitesh is an MBA graduate from SP Jain and has done his product management training from Blackbolt Consulting USA.
Mitesh Thakker – Founder of MissCallPay
MissCallPay – Challenges Faced
Any startup journey is a mixed bag of learning new things and challenges. But one major challenge Mitesh encountered was a new authentication method that needed clearance from bureaucrats. Since 2018 he visited various higher authorities to make them aware of MissCallPay and get the use-case cleared. But things didn’t move as the priorities of the regulators were altogether different. It was only in December 2019, when the need for UPI payments on feature phone payment became a priority, RBI announced its first cohort, Regulatory Sandbox, for feature-phone payment solutions. In spite of this innovation, he got disqualified as it didn’t fulfill the minimum net worth requirement for RBI Regulatory Sandbox applicants which was another roadblock.
MissCallPay has raised an undisclosed angel funding.
Advisor/Mentor: Raju Wadalkar (currently on Board with Hygge Energy and former CTO of Tech Mahindra) and MissCallPay is incubated with the Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) team, IIM Ahmedabad
MissCallPay – Competitors
Tonetag and Gupshup are the competitors of MissCallPay.
MissCallPay – Recognition & Achievements
The company has gained global recognition for the innovation done in the payment solution.
MissCallPay was the Winner of Bill Gates Grand Challenge for feature phone payments 2020. It received the cash prize of $ 30,000 and has been piloted by NPCI and PSU Bank of India in support of the Gates Foundation.
It was shortlisted as a Top-50 finalist for social impact innovation at IIGP 2018, India Innovation Growth Program 2.0
Fintegrate 2019 awards MissCallPay as one of the leading startups in the Fintech space
MissCallPay was recognized at the Maharashtra Startup Week, 2019 organized by MSInS and won the reward of Rs.15 lakhs for its innovation among #Fintech Start-ups of 3200+
Mitesh Thakker (Founder, MissCallPay) was short-listed as a Top-50 Finalist for social impact innovations at IIGP 2018.
MissCallPay – Future Plans
The startup is building a strong leadership team for successful execution and plans to work/partner with a couple of banks to help them serve more than 100 million users by the end of the year 2022.
MissCallPay is a fintech startup providing a payment solution based on UPI for the Bharat population or Non-tech savvy people using feature phones. It is a pioneer in bringing voice-based payment solutions.
Who is the founder of MissCallPay?
Mitesh Thakker is the founder of MissCallPay.
When will MissCallPay commercially launch?
MissCallPay is expecting to commercialize the launch around December 2021 and is already in talks with banks to launch its 1st voice-based payment solution for their customers.
Is MissCallPay an Indian company?
Yes. MissCallPay is an Indian company headquartered in Mumbai.
Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by Grip Invest.
Grip Invest is democratizing investment opportunities in lease finance. The startup curates investment opportunities in lease finance by identifying companies looking to lease assets to meet capital needs. It then presents these opportunities on its platform for the retail investors to participate by investing as minimum as INR 20K for an IRR of over 15%.
Grip Invest has facilitated Investments worth INR 100 crore for 40+ companies such as Udaan, Furlenco, Holisol, Everest Fleet, Loadshare, IPL Tech, ChargeZone, among many. It has a strong 100,000+ retail investor community, growing 30% month-on-month for the last 12 months.
StartupTalky interviewed Nikhil Aggarwal (Founder & CEO of Grip Invest) to get insights into the startup story and roadmap of the organization. In this article, you’ll discover how Grip Invest was conceptualized, its ideology, business model, funding, growth, future plans, and more.
Grip’s mission is to democratize investment opportunities and help individuals to create wealth at an attractive risk-reward ratio. At the same time, it also wants to contribute to the growth of the startups and companies by supporting them with capital in the form of assets.
Grip Invest presents a unique investment option of earning a higher fixed income return along with the backing of an asset (lower risk). The startup curates investment opportunities in lease finance by identifying companies looking to lease assets to meet capital needs. It then presents these opportunities on its platform for the retail investors to participate by investing as minimum as INR 20K for an IRR of over 15%.
Grip Invest – Industry Details
Karvy’s India Wealth Report 2019 puts the total individual wealth in India at $5Tn, growing 13.2% annually to $11.4Tn by 2024. While alternative investments are a fraction of the market today – just 0.5% of financial assets, the report estimates that it will be the fastest-growing segment and account for $500Bn by 2024.
At Grip, there were two insights that got the team going –
Individual investors have very limited investment options – all their friends and family were just investing in stocks or bank deposits. They knew other products existed and that there was an appetite for them but they just were not available to individual investors
Technology is making companies adopt an asset-light business model – The largest transport provider will not own vehicles (Ola, Rapido, Chalo); the largest furnishing company will not own furniture (Furlenco, Rentomojo); even Amazon Web Services, the cloud server of the world will never need to own the servers. All these business models are a layer of technology where the physical asset – cars, furniture, servers will be owned by someone else. This meant that leasing would be incredibly in demand.
Grip Invest – Founders and Team
Nikhil Aggarwal (CEO) and Vivek Gulati are the founders of Grip Invest.
Nikhil Aggarwal – Founder & CEO of Grip Invest
Nikhil’s co-founder, Vivek Gulati, used to report to him at his previous start-up, Chalo. Aashish who is Grip Invest’s Chief Product Officer also worked with Vivek and Nikhil at Chalo.
Vivek Gulati | Co-founder, Grip Invest
Over the last 6 years, Vivek has been part of multiple early-stage ventures with responsibilities in business development, business expansion, and operations. During his tenure at OYO, Vivek grew from handling business development in NCR to being a micro-market CEO to then heading OYO’s business expansion across 70 cities. Vivek’s role included sales, business strategy, revenue management, and scaling all tier-2 city businesses from 0 to $100Mn/year. Subsequently, as part of the business development team in Chalo, he brought these skill-sets to scale-up partnerships with private and government bus operators across India. In 2016, Vivek also co-founded and ran Frubox, a health food venture doing a 300+ daily delivery of fresh food. Vivek has a B.Tech degree in Chemical Engineering from the Malaviya National Institute of Technology.
Over the last 5 years, he has taken up responsibilities in product management, program management, and new product launches. Having worked with large corporations such as ICICI Lombard as well as startups, Pepperfry, Chalo, he understands how to execute and implement things in a fast and efficient way. Having worked in both technology and operational roles has helped him succeed in his last role where he grew ARR from $0.2Mn to $5Mn in 5 months. He has a B.Tech degree from one of IIT Roorkee.
Current company size: 30
Work Culture
Grip Invest has always been a people-first approach based and wanted to clearly lay down on its cultural values and style of working. Given it started post first lockdown in 2020 and the team hiring, joining and all the processes happened online, it wrote down about the cultural values early on and started onboarding people post a session on cultural values only.
The team wanted to decide on a name that can resonate with the idea of democratizing the investment for Indians by bringing the opportunities at a low minimum transaction value.
Initially, they thought of names like investxs (read – Extra Small), investequal, etc but could not finalize anything. Then Nikhil had this old business idea for real estate opportunities which was GRIP – Group Real Estate Investment and then in one of the PPTs he just used the GRIP name and it just clicked that Grip means in someone’s reach or hand and resonated so much with their current idea.
Grip Invest Logo
About logo designing: Grip Invest is a data-driven company and the team here believes in creating a process first before doing. So they finalized a process that involved understanding different color schemes, fonts, etc, and then created draft versions. Later they shared those versions with friends and family members to get feedback and finalized the one it has now.
Grip Invest – Business Model & Revenue Model
Grip’s Role for Investors
The startup undertakes the following activities for its investors –
Identify assets for investment and construct deals with leasing partners that meet its financial and risk criteria
Make these investment options (asset, details of leasing partner, and leasing terms) available on the Grip platform
Set up and ensure compliance of the SPV which owns the asset. The assets for each deal are held under an individual SPV structured as a Limited Liability Partnership to ensure transparency and avoid any chance of co-mingling of funds.
Monitoring of the investment over the tenure including ensuring timely payment of lease rental and in adverse situations resale/ release of the assets
Grip’s Proposition for Lessee’s
Generally speaking, companies use leasing as an alternative option to taking a loan to purchase an asset for a variety of reasons. In fact in countries in Europe and North America, leasing and hire purchases account for 20-40% of total investments annually while India is at a few percentage points at best.
These reasons are:
Desire to maintain an asset-light business
Inability to make the upfront payment of 20-30% of the asset value required to take a loan
Desire to match the timing of inflow and outflow or revenue and interest/ lease payments
Ability to achieve a lower cost via lease vs. loan. This depends on the financial profile of the lessee, tax, and depreciation rates that vary case by case.
Inability to take bank finance due to need to provide additional collateral or have a certain financial profile as a borrower
The flexibility of being able to replace the asset before end-of-life, especially applicable for electronics
Desire to avoid hassle or purchasing, maintaining and then selling the asset
Revenue Model
Grip Invest charges 1 to 2% from both investors and lessees on the investment amount. Additionally, it gets a 1 to 3% OEM discount on the assets.
“We are always thankful to our friends and family members who became our early believers and helped us in making references” says Nikhil, Founder & CEO, Grip Invest.
It started with a small list of 60 to 70 people in the beginning and then went ahead with word of mouth and introductions made by these people helped the startup to reach its first 100 customers. The team at Grip Invest always believed in collaboration and sharing. They started on simple yet powerful tools like Google Sheet, Asana, and Mailchimp.
Social Media is a boon for scaling up! Grip Invest started with its organic content on Facebook,Instagram, and LinkedIn. It followed a basic process of posting content that resonated with its audience about their investment woes and pain points around fluctuations in the share market, uncertainty in returns, and the mind share all this took. The team saw good traffic flowing in and eventually, people started registering and investing on the website. Great content is the best marketing strategy!
The startup has always worked with lessee partners who have great due diligence and many times a good brand presence. Th team started doing webinars with the CEOs or Founders of the companies that they leased to and eventually, they promoted the upcoming webinar events, and later the unfiltered session was launched on its YouTube Channel. All these efforts helped in building good trust and brand with their investors.
Grip Invest [Webinar]
Grip Invest – Challenges Faced
The biggest challenge faced by Grip Invest: TRUST
Investment is all about trust and it is an ongoing thing! Building that trust from scratch for a new and completely online platform was the biggest challenge.
The team at Grip Invest has always made sure –
To make their due diligence strong
To maintain great transparency on the opportunities for the investors
To get monthly/quarterly updates from their lessee partners
To take proactive measures to fix any problems that they foresee
To build for fallback mechanisms such as re-lease or sale of assets
The efforts put into building trust have gone a long way and allowed the startup to scale very quickly. It has also created a very powerful brand in the mind of its users which is reflected in the fact that at least 25% of them have referred another user to Grip.
Grip Invest has a strong 100,000+ retail investor community, growing 30% month-on-month for the last 12 months. And since its investment model is entirely based on digital payments, physical presence for investment isn’t required.
Some of the key metrics & stats of Grip Invest are –
100,000+ registered users from 42 countries and 322 cities
5,000 registered users who have made at least 1 investment
43% of users have invested more than once and 12% have invested more than 5 times. Typically an investor makes their second investment in just 25 days of the first investment.
Assets have been leased to 40 different leasing partners
13 Cr have been processed in returns to investors with nil default
The startup’s annualized revenue run rate is 7.2 Cr.
Moreover, Grip Invest has facilitated Investments worth INR 100 crore for 40+ companies such as Udaan, Furlenco, Holisol, Everest Fleet, Loadshare, IPL Tech, ChargeZone, Zypp, Vogo, FleetX, FabAlley, BlueTokai to access a different channel of growth capital.
Grip Invest – Funding and Investors
Date
Stage
Amount
Investors
Aug 2021
Series A
$3 Mn
Venture Highway, Endiya Partners, AdvantEdge
Pre-series A
–
Anicut Capital, Gemba Capital
To date, Grip Invest has raised a total funding of $3.6 million
Grip Invest recently raised INR 21 Cr ($3 million) in a Series A round led by Venture Highway, Endiya Partners, and AdvantEdge
Its Pre-Series A round was led by Anicut Capital and Gemba Capital
Key angels in the company include Anupam Mittal, Maninder Gulati, Akash & Reeju (Founders, CashFree), Satyen Kothari (Cube Wealth and Citrus Pay), Ankit Aggarwal (Navi)
The founders personally invested 15 Lakhs in the company before receiving the first round of funding
“We will utilize the capital raised to expand the range of investment products offered, launch new user features and strengthen our team as we aim to facilitate INR 1,000 Cr in investments by Sept’22” – Nikhil added
Grip Invest – Advisors and Mentors
Anupam Mittal, Founder & CEO at People Group
Sidharrth Shankar, Partner at J. Sagar Associates
Rajiv Gupta, MD at DBS Bank
Grip Invest – Competitors
There are several platforms offering new forms of investment and Grip Invest considers them to be its key competitors. These include companies like pyse, TradeCred, KredX, Klubworks, and Wint Wealth. Globally, YieldStreet in the US has been a path leader in this product with 250,000 investors and $1.3 billion in capital invested.
Grip Invest – Future Plans
Grip Invest plans to expand the range of investment products offered, launch new user features, and strengthen its team. It is eyeing to facilitate INR 1,000 Cr in investments by Sept’22.
Grip Invest – FAQs
What is Grip Invest?
Grip Invest curates investment opportunities in lease finance by identifying companies looking to lease assets to meet capital needs. It then presents these opportunities on its platform for the retail investors to participate by investing as minimum as INR 20K for an IRR of over 15%.
Who are the founders of Grip Invest?
Nikhil Aggarwal (CEO) and Vivek Gulati are the founders of Grip Invest.
When was Grip Invest launched?
Grip Invest was launched in 2020 to democratize investment opportunities and help individuals to create wealth at an attractive risk-reward ratio.
How does Grip Invest make money?
Grip Invest charges 1 to 2% from both investors and lessees on the investment amount. Additionally, it gets a 1 to 3% OEM discount on the assets.
How much funding has Grip Invest raised?
To date, Grip Invest has raised a total funding of $3.6 million.
Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by Credit Fair.
Credit Fair is a consumer lending fintech startup that provides 0% or low-cost, short-term, unsecured installment loans at the point of sale. The startup’s unique credit assessment process has helped it achieve a quick turnaround time (TAT) of less than a day and a high approval rate, enabling more Indians to avail credit. Apart from that, Credit Fair helps borrowers build a credit ladder, i.e. a credit score to help them access credit from other lenders and at a fairer rate. In just 3 years, Credit Fair managed to onboard over 1,000 merchants including upGrad, Toppr, Asian Paints among many. It has disbursed about $9 million to date with a loan book of $4 million currently.
StartupTalky interviewed Mr. Aditya Damani (Founder of Credit Fair) to get insights on the startup story and roadmap of the organization. In this article you’ll discover how Credit Fair was conceptualized, its business model, growth, funding, future plans, and more.
Credit Fair provides 0% or low-cost, short-term, unsecured installment loans at the point of sale. The short-term vision of the company is to be the preferred lender in sectors of education, healthcare, home décor, and electric vehicles. Its long-term vision is to see every Indian have access to the right amount of credit at the right cost and at the right time.
By 2025, the startup aims to positively impact the financial lives of over 1million Indians. This vision reflects in its efforts to enable low-cost loans for ‘Bharat’ i.e. people who are not served by banks and large NBFCs. Over 70% of Credit Fair’s loans are No Cost EMIs, hence offering better terms than even personal loans from banks.
Credit Fair – Industry Details
According to a report by BCG, the total value of digital lending is expected to be $1 trillion by 2023, driven by increased access to the internet and smartphones and increased digital purchases. As for the number of customers, 550 million people i,e, 46% of the population of India is currently underserved and makes up for the total addressable market.
Credit Fair has estimated the market opportunity in its target sectors – health, education, solar rooftop, and electric vehicles to be over $20 billion of which 25% is funded by EMI taking its immediate addressable market to $5bn. These sectors are fragmented but large and experiencing a high growth rate, making them attractive.
The founder got the inspiration of starting a lending business in India while working at new to credit-focused lender, Oakam, and while advising private equity funds on setting up lending businesses. He saw people face issues rejections or delays in getting credit from financial institutions during critical life moments such as medical emergencies leading to reliance on informal channels that charge usurious interest of 10% per month and getting trapped in a debt cycle. This led to the idea of launching Credit Fair.
Credit Fair – Product/Service and USP
About 550 million Indians are underserved by traditional lenders because they are new to credit (NTC) or do not have a prime credit score
Availability of credit at the point of sale is currently enabled through credit cards, penetration of which is less than 4%
Borrowers in remote areas are also underserved by traditional banks due to the high costs associated with their onboarding, management, and recovery.
Hence, there is a huge demand for formal credit that can be availed through simple processes.
On the other hand, merchants, who are majorly SMEs, struggle with providing a point of sale financing options to their customers resulting in loss of potential sales. Second, their operations are mostly based on cash transactions, leading to process inefficiencies and high transaction costs.
Credit Fair provides 0% or low-cost, short-term, unsecured installment loans at the point of sale. Itsticket size ranges from USD150-25,000 and tenure from 3 months to 3 years.
The startup’s unique credit assessment process has helped it achieve a quick turnaround time (TAT) of less than a day and a high approval rate, enabling more Indians to avail credit. Second, by providing 0% or easy EMI, it is increasing access to low-cost credit hence, securing the financing health of the borrowers. Third, Credit Fair also helps borrowers build a credit ladder, i.e. a credit score to help them access credit from other lenders and at a fairer rate.
Credit Fair – Consumer App
As for merchants, Credit Fair’s products and high TAT and approval rate help improve conversions and ensure stable cash flows for the partners, hence, overcoming the issues of low sales and lack of working capital. Second, digitizing cash flows will help merchants manage their cash flows better leading to efficiencies in operations. Finally, it will further the startup’s mission of financial inclusion as SMEs will be able to access credit and working capital loans, based on cash flows generated as a result of partnering with Credit Fair.
Credit Fair – Founders and Team
The founder, Aditya Damani, has a unique mix of fintech and institutional lending experience, having received a Banking Tech award while at new to credit-focused lender Oakam and TransferWise previously. He has also worked at PIMCO and advised private equity funds on setting up lending businesses.
Credit Fair – Founding Team
The team comprises over 50 members covering technology, credit, collections, sales, finance, and marketing functions. The team is young and shares a passion for the mission of the company as demonstrated through the values of ownership, curiosity, and obsession with customer satisfaction.
Credit Fair – Business Model & Revenue Model
Credit Fair follows a B2B2C business model. It is offering a win-win proposition to both merchants and customers by providing 0% or low-cost, short term, unsecured installment loans at the point of sale. The interest costs of these loans are borne by the merchants to attract new customers while the borrowers seek installment facilities to manage their finances. In addition, the borrowers bear a nominal processing fee and in some cases insurance fee as well.
Credit Fair – Startup Launch
It started with acquiring partners in the home décor sector through forming connections over LinkedIn and through cold calling. Because this sector was not actively served by big players such as Bajaj, the founders recognized an opportunity to develop expertise within the sector and provide products and processes suitable for customers within the home décor segment. That helped Credit Fair become the preferred lending partner in the home décor segment. Soon after they targeted the elective healthcare sector that also was vastly underserved by existing players.
The team focused on serving their partner merchants better than the competitors by providing better approval rates, faster turnaround time, and competitive pricing. That has been a key factor in retaining partners and capturing a bigger share of their wallets as well as getting recommendations from existing partners to form new partnerships.
Credit Fair – Challenges Faced
One major challenge that Aditya faced is – Aligning the different teams within the company to focus on the company goals while managing risk. He often observed that the different teams such as credit, operations, collections, etc. would have their team goals which often wouldn’t add to the company’s growth or would be contradictory to the goals of other departments.
One tool, that has been very effective to achieve team-company alignment is setting OKRs. The founders set company OKRs (Objectives & key Results) and based on it, each team lead has developed team OKRs. This has helped them identify key metrics for individual teams that together contribute to the company’s growth. The OKRs are reviewed quarterly and have been effective to give direction to all team members.
Credit Fair – Funding and Investors
Credit Fair has raised a total funding of $15mn, details are as follows –
Date
Stage
Amount
Investors
June 2021
Seed
$15 Mn (Debt + Equity)
Equity – Anand Ladsariya and Alok Agarwal; Debt – Undisclosed
Credit Fair – Advisors/Mentors
Credit Fair’s board of advisors comprises of C-Suite from companies such as HDFC, IFC, PayU, and IBM.
Among large lenders, Bajaj Finance is its primary competitor. Among fintech lenders, Credit Fair’s competitors include companies such as Liquiloans, EarlySalary, ZestMoney, and Eduvanz.
Credit Fair – Tools used to run startup
The startup uses Slack for team communications, OKRs for goal setting and tracking, Jira for sprint planning in addition to using third-party services for managing certain business operations.
Credit Fair – Current Growth & Future Plans
Credit has onboarded over 1,000 merchants including upGrad, Toppr, Indira IVF, Pristyn Care, Toothsi, Asian Paints, and Ampere.
It has disbursed about $9 million to date with a loan book of $4 million currently.
The startup’s month-on-month growth rate is 15%.
Credit Fair was selected to be part of Village Capital’s Finance Forward: India 2020 cohort.
In the next two years, Credit Fair aims to establish partnerships with 5,000 merchants, reaching $15 million monthly disbursements. It is building its products to reach a $15M monthly disbursement rate and $75M Assets under management in 2 years. The funds will be used towards providing loss guarantee, expanding team, and marketing. It also plans to launch a P2P lending platform to further lower its cost of funding, hence keeping costs low for its customers.
Credit Fair – FAQs
What is Credit Fair?
Credit Fair is a fintech startup that provides 0% or low-cost, short-term, unsecured installment loans at the point of sale.
What is Credit Fair’s Business Model?
Credit Fair follows a B2B2C business model. It is offering a win-win proposition to both merchants and customers by providing 0% or low-cost, short-term, unsecured installment loans at the point of sale.
How much funding has Credit Fair raised?
Credit Fair has raised total funding of $15mn (Equity + debt) from Anand Ladsariya and Alok Agarwal.
Is Credit Fair an Indian Company?
Yes. Credit Fair is an Indian company headquartered in Mumbai.
Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by Neokred.
Neokred’s NeoBox is aimed to be the one-stop platform to service any fintech use cases, whether it can be facilitating BNPL to your end-users, credit cards to your employees, virtual bank accounts for salary disbursement, and even having your own POS terminal. All in your brand name with Neokred being the powering entity.
StartupTalky interviewed Mr. Tarun Nazare (Co-founder & CEO, Neokred) to get insights on the startup story of Neokred and its roadmap ahead. In this article, you’ll discover how Neokred started, its product offering, funding details, growth and more.
Neokred has created a ‘NeoBox’ signifying ‘Bank in a Box’ concept which facilitates curated cards, bank accounts, and merchant acquiring. Companies who want to provide financial services in a curated format to their users can use this box in a plug-and-play model.
Neokred’s NeoBox is an aggregation channel that facilitates financial services as a platform plugin in their respective mobile application or ERPs. There are various use cases that are serviceable to the respective market which eases the way of banking and availing financial products. NeoBox can be plugged into all sectors and service any industry type. Currently, services such as prepaid cards are being serviced. In the next few months, the startup is entering into Bank Accounts and Merchant Acquiring space with innovative plugin fintech products.
“Any company can become a Fintech with our NeoBox Solution. Corporates or Fintechs with existing or new user base and plugin financial services in their own mobile app for their customers. Open Banking is our core belief and we are excited to be in this space at the right time with the right bank partners who think out of the box in innovative new product designs” -says Tarun Nazare, Co-founder & CEO, Neokred
Neokred – Industry Details
Any industry can be serviced with Neokred’s NeoBox. For example, Ola scooter getting a vehicle financing option for its customers, Dunzo facilitating Vehicle loans for delivery partners wanting to buy a vehicle, Swiggy introducing Order now pay later, Expense and Incentive cards for supply chain companies, and etc.
As a B2B company, the market is largely underpenetrated due to the traditional mechanism of payments which makes it interesting to us to be in this space at the right time. The market size of an Open Banking market will touch 43,150 million by 2026 (in the next 5 years), registering a CAGR of 24.4% [Source Allied Market Research]
In the next 5 years, every company will avail fintech products to their large user base. Innovative fintech companies specializing in each aspect of the banking vertical will be focused upon.
Neokred – Idea & Inspiration
Tarun & Rohith were working in the B2B and B2C payments space with Top tier banks to understand compliance, issuance, acquiring roadblocks, and regulatory issues faced by a company that wants to launch a fintech product and service a particular niche in the market. During their tenure, they noticed that the duration of an idea to go live is between 7-12 months and this wait is what is being bridged by Neokred. The days of waiting to launch a product for 7-12 months goes away with Neokred’s NeoBox, companies can now launch their fintech products within 30 days.
The founders had experienced it themselves while launching their first product in the prepaid card which took about 7 months and had researched and studied other company experiences who were associated with their respective partner bank on availing any fintech product. The market in offering many such fintech products is still underpenetrated even after a decade in the digital economy.
While creating the NeoBox, the team spoke to large corporates, SMEs, and Startups to understand the duration and roadblocks they have faced while consulting with a financial institution. Many companies faced the problem of hiring the right technology team for building and integrating the APIs they were given, designing the product with the banking partner which achieves product-market fit for that respective market, and tweaking a service to address a query in a better manner, most of the companies wanted a ready platform and not in an API format to start servicing the user.
Neokred’s NeoBox is a platform built to plug and play into any existing ERPs, the SDK journeys are curated as per client expectation and plugged into their respective mobile app for faster GTM. SDKs are in multiple programming languages suited to be integrated seamlessly.
Neokred’s Neobox
The platform can service use cases such as prepaid card, credit card with loan management system and risk underwriting, create bank accounts such as salary account, savings accounts and current account with add on features such as Investments, Insurance, fixed deposits and recurring deposits at the moment. The startup has plans to integrate third-party company APIs on the SDK journey that specialize in their own banking vertical such as KYC, Cyber security, AML checks, cust ID generation, and few core banking platforms.
Neokred’s NeoBox is aimed to be the one-stop platform to service any fintech use cases, whether it can be facilitating BNPL to your end-users, credit cards to your employees, virtual bank accounts for salary disbursement, and even having your own POS terminal. All in your brand name with Neokred being the powering entity.
Neokred – Founders and Team
Tarun Nazare and Rohith Reji are the founders of Neokred.
They were working in their previous firm as a Finance Manager and VP of sales respectively with Tarun having to work with B2B and B2C payments company and Rohith who had his own startup in the middle east.
Tarun Nazare | Co-Founder & CEO/CPO, Neokred
Tarun Nazare – Co-founder & CEO of Neokred
Tarun is a Visionary who handles the Tech and Product in Neokred. Innovating with Payments tech is his hobby as well. He has Certified in Data Science from IIM-K and Certified Product Management from Duke University. Tarun brings around 6 years experience in the payments domain.
Rohith Reji | Co-Founder & CBO, Neokred
Rohith Reji – Co-founder & CBO, Neokred
Rohith is a StoryTeller and handles the Business and Strategy in Neokred. Apart from Neokred, he has been the Organizer Head @ TedX and also co-founded a startup named, Onvo.
Team & Work Culture
Team size – 35
Work Culture – Startup innovation arena, co-creating innovative products, products built for companies are given free to Neokred employees – Credit card (0% interest), BNPL (0% interest), Insurance (up to 10L) and many more.
Hiring funda – People who can think out of the box, problem solvers, designing thinking, and market thinking validators are welcomed.
Neokred – Name Meaning & Logo
Neo = New/Digital & Kred = Credibility, hence, Neokred. The founders believe that it is very important to have digital trust in the digital economy as money matters are very sensitive matters.
Neokred Logo
Neokred – Launch and Marketing Strategies
Understanding client requirements in depth which can be replicated to everyone in that industry is what the team at Neokred focuses extensively on. When they get this right, offering to players in a similar market with all the use cases and problems being addressed is a calculated pitch.
The startup has been very selective with banking partner tie-ups. For it, if a bank is innovative in nature and is ready to play a product in an open manner, it is the right partner for the company. Banks with legacy systems are least preferred by Neokred and its clients as well.
The founders have been building in public and taking part in seminars and conferences, this has allowed businesses to recognize Neokred better as a brand which has led to increased sales. As a B2B company, the marketing budget is mostly spent on professional platforms and users are captured in an indirect manner through the clients.
Making Neokred’s NeoBox a pure plugin platform was the hard part which took the compliance, risk monitoring and management, client and bank expectation of a program. The founders had fruitful discussions with their partner’s product team and they were willing to experiment with the APIs provided.
One such experiment was co-creating contactless wearables for people who love to go for a jog and not wanting to carry their mobile phone or card. With this contactless launch, Neokred now has 50,000 joggers using it as a key chain.
Neokred has created a ‘NeoBox’ signifying ‘Bank in a Box’ concept which facilitates curated cards, bank accounts, and merchant acquiring. Companies who want to provide financial services in a curated format to their users can use this box in a plug-and-play model.
Who founded Neokred?
Tarun Nazare and Rohith Reji are the founders of Neokred.
How much funding has Neokred raised?
Neokred has raised total funding of $1.2 Million as of 2021.
Fintech is one of the leading industries in the world because of many emerging unicorns in the sector. The fintech industry has become a game-changer for banking services industries as it has been tremendously impacted by Technology enterprises. Most Fintech startups offer financial services such as mobile payment, digital banking, insurance, crowdfunding, wealth management, or recently even digital currencies like cryptocurrency.
Fintech companies nowadays have to rely on advanced technology like datasets, Internet of Things (IoT) artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, or even blockchain in order to provide their services. Fintech currently has over 79 Unicorns globally making it the largest sector with the most number of Unicorns, while there are more upcoming fintech startups that will be added to the list.
The global Fintech market was said to be valued at $111 billion, while it is now expected to grow to more than $158 billion by 2023. China is often considered one of the leading countries in the sector of financial technology. The country so far has over 2,160 Fintech startups out of which over 18 are already unicorns. According to some studies over half of the world’s digital payments were made in the country using apps like Alipay and WeChat in 2017.
In 2018, China received over $25.5 billion investments into its fintech industry making it the leader in this sector. Even to this date china continues to be the leader in the industry because it completed over 600 plus deals in 2018 alone, the country also has the highest fintech adoption rate of 69% in the world.
China went through a Fintech boom because many startups wanted to fill the gap of traditional banking which lacked in the country by introducing fintech services that fulfilled the needs of ordinary people and SMEs. Because of the growth of the fraudulent practices in the Chinese sector in China, the Government has come up with rules and regulations including 65 national financial standards and 252 financial industry standards to control them.
The fintech startups in China are targeting the middle class in the sectors of wealth management, different types of insurance and private banking as the services like mobile payment is already popular in the country.
Tencent is considered to be one of the largest gaming companies in the world, but also has a foothold in the Fintech industry. Over the years the company has come up with top-notch payment services through WeChat, which was considered to be the first online-only bank offering wealth management and other financial services in China. Through WeChat Pay the company has made many strategic investments and third-party marketplaces, increasing its valuation to $21 billion in 2018.
The company was initially founded by Ma Huateng, Tony Zhang, Xu Chenye, Chen Yidan and Zeng Liqing in 1998, with its headquarters based in Shenzhen, China. The main competitor to Tencent in the fintech sector is Alipay which is under Alibaba. By the end of 2019, WeChat had is estimated 800 million users and 50 million merchants on the platform every month. This is why Tencent is one of the most financially valuable companies in the world.
Ant Financial
Company
Ant Financial
Founded year
2014
Headquarters
Hangzhou (China)
Funding
$22 Billion
Investors
General Atlantic, Meros Equity Global Management, Warburg Pincus, The Carayle Group, Credit Suisse, Temasek Holdings, Sequoia Capital, Khazanah Nasional, Silver Lake
Ant Financial Logo
Ant Financial is one of the top fintech startups in China that was founded in 2014 with its headquarters in Hangzhou, China. Ant Financial provides various digital payment services for both customers and businesses.
Ant Financial is known for its Alipay mobile wallets which offer financial services like transferring money to bank accounts, bill payments, online or offline mobile bill payments, among others. The brands under Ant Financial are Alipay, Ant Fortune, Yu’e Bao, Zhima Credit, MYbank and Ant Financial Cloud.
Alipay also allows SMEs to accept online payments from customers through cards, corporate credit solutions and Bank transfers. Ant Financial Group is a subsidiary of the Alibaba Group which is a Chinese eCommerce giant and is also said to be the world’s most valuable Unicorn Company.
As of 2018, the company has over 87 million users across the world along with JV partners, currently, it has over 1.2 billion users worldwide. Besides its mobile wallet services, Ant Financial is also a leading fundraising company in the country.
Lufax is a popular online wealth management and P2P lending platform for personal loans. The company provides insurance services to both individuals and institutions with advanced technology like AI and Cloud. Lufax was founded by 2011 in Shanghai, China and was originally set up by Ping An as an incubation project.
It currently is the second-largest P2P lender in the country and is planning to branch out its business gradually to work with funds and insurance companies. In 2018, the company also expanded its services to Singapore, the same year it also came out with a new blockchain solution that identifies users and tracks transactions, especially between borrowers and lenders. Lufax is said to be the best Internet financing industry in China as it has accelerated the marketing process.
Bitmain
Company
Bitmain
Founded year
2013
Headquarters
Beijing (China)
Funding
$764.7 million
Investors
Temasek Holdings, Crimson Ventures, Noris Capital, Newegg, Coatue, Sequoia Capital China, CAS Investment Management, Jumbo Sheen Group, HuangPu River Capital
Bitmain Logo
Bitcoin is a well-known Edtech startup that provides hardware-based mining solutions for Cryptocurrencies. The company was started by Micree Zhan, Jihan Wu in 2013 with its headquarters based in Beijing, China. Bitmain is known for providing hardware-based mining (ASIC) solutions for bitcoin mining. By 2018, the company became the largest designer of ASIC chips for bitcoin mining.
Besides ASIC chips the company also makes servers, simple routers, AI applications, mining tools and other services & products for blockchain. Bitmain also operates BTC.com and Antpool which became the biggest pool for bitcoin. Bitcoin introduced Bitmain Technology in 2013 that successfully engaged with the field of AI and increased power consumption speed.
Simon Investment Managers, EG Capital Advisors, Affirma Capital, ORIX Asia Capital, CITIC Securities, China Minsheng Investment Group, GIC
Dianrong Logo
Dianrong is a leading peer to peer platform for personal loans. The company was founded in 2012 with its headquarters in Shanghai, China. Dianrong provides products and service offerings like credit ratings, investment products, marketplace lending solutions risk management and operation tools.
In 2018, the company created a supply chain finance solution designed especially for finance and business. The company provides a well planned and secure infrastructure for industry data and insights.
Ping An
Company
Ping An
Founded year
1988
Headquarters
Shenzhen (China)
Funding
$4.8 billion
Investors
–
Ping An Logo
Ping An Technology is the main subsidiary of Ping An Group a multinational conglomerate. The company is in charge of the financial sector that provides services like insurance, banking, investment, and numerous other internet businesses. The company went on to create Lufax and Oneconnect which are both well-known fintech companies in China.
The company was founded in 2008 and initially provided IT services to firms within the Ping An Insurance Group. Ping An also allows its customers to use its P2P lending services over AI technology. Ping An was the first insurance company to be selected on the index and is currently the World’s top global insurance brand in 2020.
CICC, COFCO, APOFCO, Sequoia Capital China, China Creation Ventures, China Taiping Insurance, Intonation Ventures, Harvest Global Investments
JD Finance is one of the leading Chinese fintech companies that was started by the JD Group in 2013. JD Group is one of the biggest B2C online retailers in China. The company has its headquarters in Beijing, China and aims to become the most trustworthy internet investment and funding platform. The company provides its customers with services for investment and financial management, which are easy, high yielding and safe.
The company uses advanced technology big data, AI, cloud computing, blockchain and IoT for providing its financial services. JD Finance is estimated to be $20 billion as it raised over $1.9 billion in 2018. The company comprises 10 business divisions that cover different types of covering corporate and consumer finance needs.
Renrenxing Technology
Company
Renrenxing Technology
Founded year
2014
Headquarters
Beijing (China)
Funding
CN¥ 4.5 billion
Renrenxing Technology is another popular Chinese Edtech startup that is known for developing applications for borrowing and lending money. The company started Jiedaibao in 2015 which has its headquarters in Beijing, China. Jiedaibao is a leader in providing peer to peer services for lending and borrowing money, besides that it also offers services like matching, registration, collection and other services for small loans for customers and SMEs.
The company is now known to be the country’s top tech unicorn company as its valuation is estimated to be over $10 billion. Through Jiedaibao, Renrenxing Technology has come up with an app that helps in deciding interest rates independently and based on that it generates an electronic contract that is legal. This enables their customers to get personal loans at a fixed price and get reminded of the repayment or expiry of the contract.
