Norwest, Elevation lead $40 mn bet on IFC-backed Mintifi
Buy now pay later (BNPL) platform Mintifi, which is backed by International Finance Corporation (IFC), on Tuesday said it has secured a Series C funding of $40 million led by Norwest Venture Partners and Elevation Capital.
The round also saw participation from existing investors IFC and Lok Capital.
The Mumbai-based company plans to use the fresh funds to boost its technology support, expand product offerings, which include BNPL solutions for SMEs, scale the co-lending platform via its plug and play solution and deepen its ties in the supply chain network by building an end-to-end platform across industries.
It, however, did not disclose the valuation of its fundraise.
Mintifi, which is being run by Mintifi Technlogies Pvt Ltd, claims to have grown over four times on a year-on-year basis and also said that its annualised purchases touched $300 million. The funds will also enable the platform to expand their capital base to over $500 million. The company expects its annualised purchases to cross $1 billion by 2023.
Founded in 2017, by Anup Agarwal, Ankit Mehta and Sanjoy Shome, Mintifi claims to provide loans and other lending facilities to small and medium businesses (SMBs) through its online platform. It uses a data-driven process to assess a customer’s creditworthiness. The company, unlike many fintech startups, is profitable at the bottomline level, Agarwal told VCCircle.
“For us, it has always been a very, very clear focus on ensuring that we truly do businesses where unit economics makes sense and we eventually make money. Eventually, it’s all about whether the organization is going to make money or not, if you can’t make money, even after three or four years of of being in operations, my sense is you typically will find it hard to make business going forward as well,” said Agarwal.
Mintifi claims to be working with over 100 brands across India including Tata Motors, Bridgestone Tyres, Berger Paints, Polycab, NIVEA and Jockey to enable supply chain by digitizing payments, invoicing and purchase financing solutions for their distributors and retailers.
The company said its payment and financing stack optimizes payment processing time, thus enabling retailers, distributors and brands to witness increased inventory turns. Mintifi said it partners with marquee banks and financial institutions on its co-lending platform.
“Mintifi adopts a full stack approach to address the transaction, financing and payments needs of the B2B ecosystem through its unique B2B BNPL solution and technology platform.
Mintifi’s offering has witnessed strong adoption from over 100 leading brands in India, while operating a profitable business model,” said Niren Shah, Managing Director and Head at Norwest Venture Partners India.
Agarwal told VCCircle that the company clocked gross revenue of $3 million in 2020-21 (FY21) and is on track to clock revenues of $10 million by end of 2021-22 (FY22).
“If Covid two was not there, we would have clocked revenues of around $14-$15 million. Next year, we expect this to grow manifold to $35 million,” Agarwal said.
Mintifi said that prior to the latest round, it had raised $60 million till date in a mix of equity and debt. In February 2019, IFC had invested $8 million in Mintifi, VCCircle had reported. The Mumbai-based firm had raised $2 million in 2018 as a part of its Seed funding round from venture capital (VC) firm Lok Capital.
Avendus Capital acted as the exclusive financial advisor to Mintifi on this transaction.
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