Fintech company Cred raises $120 million round

BENGALURU: Serial entrepreneur Kunal Shah’s venture

Cred

is raising $120 million (around Rs 863 crore) led by US-based fintech-focused investor Ribbit Capital and DST Partners — the personal investment vehicle of the partners at Israeli-Russian billionaire Yuri Milner’s

DST Global

— latest regulatory filings showed.


As reported by TOI in May,

Tiger Global

, which is aggressively making new India bets, is joining as a new investor in the one-year-old Cred, which allows users to pay credit card bills and get rewards for the same. According to the filings, Asian investor Hillhouse Capital has also joined the round along with other institutional investors such as Greenoaks Capital, valuing the company at $440-450 million (Rs 3,238 crore). US-based Dragoneer has also participated in this round, but those details are not filed with the ministry of corporate affairs yet, a person aware of the matter said. This would make Cred one of the fastest startups to fetch this valuation in one year.

The company now plans to bring products on its platform that can be monetised, according to the company’s agenda in the filings, sourced from business intelligence platform Tofler. Cred will be using the new capital to launch new consumer products powered by banks and expand operations outside India, said Shah. He did not comment on the fund-raise. “We are in talks with banks for partnership and launch new products powered by them,” he added. The new products would include lending options of its partner banks.

Currently, Shah’s Cred offers various kind of rewards across consumer businesses like dining out, air travel, food delivery and e-commerce. According to the regulatory documents, Cred had over 7 lakh registered users and 38 brand partners as of April. Consumers need to have a minimum credit score of 750 to open an account on Cred.

Shah had previously started payments platform Freecharge and later sold it to Snapdeal in 2015 for $400 million, in what was one of the largest internet sector merger and acquisition in India then. Prior to this, Cred had raised $25 million (Rs 180 crore) in its first round of funding from

Sequoia Capital

, Ribbit Capital, RPT Global (formerly RuNet), China’s Morningside Venture Capital, and Israeli-Russian Yuri Milner’s personal investment vehicle Apoletto, apart from individual angel investors.