CASHe, an app-based personal lending platform, has today announced that it has raised ₹25 crore in Series-A funding round from Blackstone group’s former PE business co-head Mathew Cyriac and other investors.
As per the reports, Cyriac has invested in his personal capacity, as well as through a group of investors within his investment firm Florintree Advisors. Also, Aeries Financial Technologies, the parent company of CASHe, has secured a line of credit from Kotak Mahindra Bank to take care of its lending book.
This is the first round of external funding raised by the startup, with the company’s founder V Raman Kumar himself having invested ₹42 crore while setting it up through other group companies. He further added that the company has plans to secure Series B funding worth ₹100 crore by the end of this year or early next year.
The company also plans to introduce more products that will be relevant for CASHe’s user base, most likely a solution that can help with the initial amount needed for a down payment while making major purchases.
In a response to ETTech, CASHe founder V Raman Kumar said that the company is targeting loan disbursals of ₹70 lakh to 1 crore per month in 2017-18. He said:
We started a year ago and are currently disbursing Rs 1 crore a day. Our current turnover is Rs 360 crore and we are targeting a turnover of Rs1,000-1,200 crore in 2017 18. The company will be profitable around July.
With this latest fundraising round, Mathew Cyriac and Pulak Ghosh, a professor at the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore, have joined the board of CASHe.
V Raman Kumar said that the company is primarily targeting users in the 25-35 age bracket and has 20,000 registered users, of which 10,000 actively use the app. As per the company, over 75 percent of these are repeat users, with the lending amount ranging from ₹18,000 to ₹20,000 for 1530 day period, and ₹45,000-55,000 for the 90-day credit period.
CASHe, a cutting-edge fin-tech product, provides short-term personal loans to young salaried professionals via a simple yet powerful app. The platform is powered by a proprietary predictive algorithm called The Social Loan Quotient (SLQ) that creates a sophisticated credit profile of consumers totally different from conventional banks and credit agencies.
