Bengaluru based Fintech startup BharatX has attracted a handsome seed round $4.5Mn, with Y Combinator leading the same. The round also garnered contributions from 8i Ventures, Multiply Ventures, Soma Capital among others. Angel investors like Arash Ferdowsi (Co-founder, Dropbox), Harshil Mathur (CEO & Co-Founder, Razorpay), Shashank Kumar (Founder, Razorpay), Varun Alagh (Co-founder & CEO, Mamaearth), Kunal Shah (Founder and CEO, CRED), Ankur Aggarwal (Co-founder, Dunzo), Vikas Choudhury (President, Reliance Jio) also chipped in.
BharatX is an embedded finance startup, more specifically embedded credit, founded by Mehul Nath Jindal, Eeshan Sharma, and Shyam Murugan in 2019. Embedded finance Fintechs provide financial services on non-financial consumer facing websites. Websites that aren’t primarily meant for financial services (OTT platforms, eCommerce portals etc.) can use embedded finance options as a quicker way to provide users with finance options, instead of putting in hard years to develop a financial arm of their own.
An anecdotal example would be, a consumer looking to buy a smartphone from Amazon, can opt for multiple EMI, downpayment, Pay later options at checkout, which are provided by embedded finance Fintechs. BharatX offered embedded credit services, allowing end users to get easy access to loan options on third party non finance websites.
Mehul Jindal, Co-Founder and CEO at BharatX, said “We want to give the Middle Class of India easy access to credit products that they deserve yet are not able to access today, while setting the bar for world-class UX and customer service while doing so.”
BharatX boast a credit approval rate of 45-55%, almost quadruple the market standard. With the freshly acquired capital, they will be looking to expand their team, improve the product and tap into the $1 Trillion credit gap for the Indian middle class. BharatX’s ‘Pay in 3’ feature has been a good hook for it to capture new consumers, as it allows a consumer to split a high ticket transaction into 3 equal interest free instalments.
With digitization seeping through everything the world has to offer, embedded finance Fintechs have been gaining solid momentum. BharatX will be competing with multiple established names like M2P (formerly YAP), Niro, Rupifi, FundFina and more recent emerging player Falcon.
