For students and young professionals, it probably has never been easy to get a loan to buy a laptop, upgrade a PC, go for a branded smart phone, or say, source funds to pay the rental advance, except with parent’s support. Micro-lending platform KrazyBee, according to its founder and Chief Executive E Madhusudan “is tapping the business potential in this space.”
The company has, within one-and-half years, registered over 4 lakh borrowers on its platform and disbursed loans to more than 3 lakh individuals. “The turn-around time is 24 hours for a new customer as we have to do all the e-KYC checks and less than a minute for repeat borrowers,” Madhusudan told BusinessLine.
“We take care of funding the small ticket loans (between ₹30,000 to ₹ 2 lakh), particularly pockets where banks don’t do enough,” he said and added that the company leverages on its technology platform.
It has disbursed around ₹100 crore this far during the current fiscal and is hoping to add another ₹50 crore to its loan book before the close of this fiscal.
KrazyBee is present in 14 cities such as Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Vellore, Pune, Mysuru, Coimbatore and few other cities. It has tied up with 40+ colleges in Coimbatore alone (It set up its presence here in October).
Highlighting the opportunity in lending to students and young professionals (its target customers), Madhusudan said, “we receive close to 3,000 applications every day, process around 2,000 loans daily. Students seek money to pay their semester fee, for laptop purchase, two-wheeler loan, etc. While there are many NBFCs ready to finance two-wheelers, it does not come easy when one is still a student and more so, if he/ she is not a native of that particular State where the student has come to study. The problem in such cases (migrant students) is unique and high. We help such students by adding the parent as a co-borrower and doing the e-filing and e-KYC checks. This helps the borrower save ₹8,000-₹10,000, which would otherwise have been spent on transporting the vehicle from his native State plus the fee towards re-registration,” he explained.
Fund raising
The company recently raised $8 million in Series A funding led by Xiaomi Technologies and Shunwei Capital, taking the total composite funds received till date to $13 million. This includes a seed fund of $2million and pre-Series A funding of $3million.
Madhusudan said that the funds raised would be used for strengthening its technology platform (risk model and algorithm), catering to new market segments and product diversification as well.
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