Chennai based Neo-finance startup Kaleidofin Neobank has raised $15 Mn lead by Michael and Susan Dell foundation. The round also saw participation from Bill and Melinda Gates foundation’s Seattle based strategic investment fund, existing investors (OikoCredit, Flourish Ventures, Blume Ventures, Omidyar Network) and some minor contributions from angel investors.
Kaleidofin, founded by Sucharita Mukherjee and Puneet Gupta in 2017, is a Neobank that has its target demographic in the 600 million-strong informal sector of India. The company aims to bring banking and other financial solutions in easy access to these customers, who are rather unexplored by other Fintechs. Kaleidofin helps bring banking services to the smartphones of these users, as transition to digital finance seems to have passed over them till now.
Mukherjee, Co-founder and CEO, Kaleidofin said, “The partnership seeks to offer a broad range of financial services to underserved communities with a specific focus on low-income women customers at scale. The new funds will be used to further strengthen all our product lines, but will specifically help us launch and scale our KaleidoCredit business aimed at offer customised credit products for individuals and nano and micro SME customers.”
Kaleidofin’s current product line includes KaleidoGoals (goal-based savings solutions), KiScore (supervised machine learning based automated credit health check for informal sector customers), KaleidoCredit (credit as a platform service for lending and debt capital markets use cases) and KaleidoPay (suite of inclusive payment solutions aimed at non smart phone users who currently cannot make payments using UPI.)
The Company had introduced KiScore — which will get the bulk of this current fundraise — a supervised machine learning based automated credit health check for informal sector customers in 2020. KiScore has been used to underwrite over INR 6300 crores (USD 830 million) in Credit. The credit business will build upon the KiScore model and will offer credit as a platform service for lending to individuals.
Kaleidofin has an impressive reach in the Indian market, carrying a userbase of 1.2 million across 230 districts in 14 states of India. The company plans to use funds of this round to make more detailed tailor-made banking solutions for the informal sector.
The news comes as the Indian finance ecosystem seems to be embracing the concept of Neobanks. Recently, Bengaluru based Neobank Open raised around $50 million and became India’s 100th unicorn.
