Serial entrepreneur Kunal Shah’s brainchild CRED, the popular credit card bill payment app, has announced a new $80 Mn Series F round. The round is being lead by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC. Existing backers Global, Sofina Ventures, Alpha Wave Ventures and Dragoneer have also participated in this round.
A regulatory filing with the Registrar of Companies (RoC) shows that the digital payments platform has approved the issuance of 42,308 Series F Compulsorily Convertible Preference Shares (CCPS) at an issue price of Rs 145,846.98 per share to raise $80 million. The same has now been officially announced by the company.
This would be CRED’s fourth funding round in the last 18 months. The firm has begun this round at an astounding valuation of $6.4 Bn. This is a 60% growth from the time of its series E funding round, which totalled up to $251 Mn, when the company was valued at $4Bn.
CRED, the Bengaluru-based Fintech startup, is an app that lets users pay their credit card bills online. Credit card bill payment has not been a process of hassle since a long time, since most banks have their netbanking platforms and apps to do the same. But CRED revolutionized the process by employing behaviour incentivisation. Instead of putting forth the aspects of late fees and interest rates, CRED gave its users incentives in the form of discounts and aggressive cashback offers for paying their credit card bills on time. Additionally, the company has also set up a community of its users who have a credit score of over 750, offering them more impressive deals, unsecured quick loans and more. This community gets premium discounts in areas like high end hotel bookings and more. In the process, the company has been directly responsible for inculcating better financial habits and money management tendencies in the Indian population.
The company has a userbasw of about 7.5 million and it facilitates 25% of all credit card transactions. The companies revenue grew to ₹88 crore in FY2021 from ₹52 lakh in FY2020. The company has also reported a 45% increase in losses. Recently, CRED acquired finance management firm Happay, to give their own app a deeper use case compatible with their MSP. CRED is also in talks to acquire Smallcase, a platform which helps new and young entrants in the equity market make investments.
The investment comes at a time when startups across the globe have been struggling with financing. While seed and series A level Startups, especially Fintechs, have not been on the steepest hill, unicorn fintech PayTM has reported a sizeable loss in its latest quarterly numbers.
