As a digital-lender to SMEs, KNAB raises little over USD 420K from InCred and a dozen other investors
KNAB
Founders: Madeep Chaudhary, Thomas Verghese and Vineet Gupta
Founded in: 2015
Financing status: Approximately USD 420K in two separate funding rounds in 2017
Bangalore-based fin-tech startup KNAB Finance has raised a little over USD 420,000 in two separate funding rounds. Investors included the non-banking financial company, InCred, and over a dozen other individual investors. Most of the individual funders are from financial institutions, such as Krishnakumar Natarajan, executive chairman of Mindtree, and Ravi Bhardwaj, senior vice-president of Sharjah Islamic Bank.
KNAB was launched in late 2015, but received its operating license in late 2016, and distributed its first loans in January 2017. It was founded by Madeep Chaudhary, Thomas Verghese and Vineet Gupta. Chaudhary, an IIT Delhi graduate, worked for India’s Central Bureau of Investigation, CitiBank and Barclays Bank; Verghese previously worked at Hewlett-Packard and founded HSBSoft Technologies; Gupta held positions at Infosys and Mindtree before co-founding KNAB.
Customers seeking loans can apply on KNAB’s platform. The startup, then, uses over 300 variables to analyze and determine their customers KNAB score and loan eligibility before supplying the loans. Short-term loans, some as short as one month, are also available to customers. The startup claims to have already distributed loans in the amount of USD 1.7 million with an average loan amount of USD 10,000.
Other key players in the digital-lending space that have recently raised funding include DigiLend, Billionloans Financial Services, Stashfin, and Lendingkart.
(Top photo from Pixabay)