Lendingkart Secures $10M To Help India’s SMBs

Lendingkart is on its way to helping more small businesses in India secure more capital.

The New Delhi-based company recently raised $10 million, TechCrunch reported, noting that the Series A funding round was led by Saama Capital, Mayfield Fund, Shailesh Mehta and Ashvin Chadha. Lendingkart has been growing rapidly across the region, processing small loans from 50 cities and 17 states across India.

Its new capital is said to be slated to help the company grow into more regions in India by hiring more employees and enhancing its services. For India, Lendingkart is like the Lending Club for the area, as it provides alternative financing options for many small businesses that otherwise might not be able to secure as much capital. Instead of looking toward traditional banks, businesses can work with Lendingkart to streamline the financing process.

In fact, Lendingkart says it can process a loan in just about 15 minutes and claims most loans are approved within hours and distributed out in three business days. The site also works with Flipkart and Snapdeal to help online sellers get their hands on funds that they otherwise might not be able to access.

“Lendingkart has enough data available to determine a customer’s intent to pay back a loan, the quality of his product or service, the financial health of his business, and ability to survive with competition,” CEO Harshvardhan Lunia told TechCrunch. “We don’t ask the customer to fill out large forms. We scrape this data from public and private sources and APIs.”

With India’s growing SMB populations, Lendingkart is hoping to fill a gap with the many small businesses that have no access to financing. India’s eCommerce market — anticipated to be worth $50 billion in five years’ time — demonstrates why companies like Lendingkart exist.

So what’s next for the company?

“We will be targeting all the niches in the country where secondary verified data is available to us from third-party sources,” Lunia told TechCrunch. “So rather than bothering the borrower for document submission and evaluation, we will extract data from his ecosystem and evaluate him.”



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