As it strives to achieve 6,000 crores in assets under management by 2025, this fresh equity investment will help Kinara develop five times as fast.
Small business lender Kinara Capital said that it had received 200 crores (about $25 million) in a fundraising round headed by British International Investment, a development finance institution (DFI) from the UK (BII).
Existing investors Nuveen Global Impact Fund and ASN Microkredietfonds, a listed and licensed Dutch microfinance fund advised by Triple Jump, also participated in the round.
“This new equity investment will propel Kinara to grow 5x by 2025 as it aims to reach assets under management (AUM) of ₹6,000 crores by accessing formal financial inclusion via its myKinara app,” the company said in a statement.
Since its founding in 2011, the Bengaluru-based FinTech company has raised a total of $90 million in equity, according to Hardika Shah, founder, and CEO of Kinara Capital, who spoke to VCCircle.
The MSME-focused lender recently secured equity funding in April of this year for 380 crores (about $50 million) from two new international investors, led by Nuveen Global Impact Fund and Dutch investor Triple Jump.
“We have already crossed ₹1,700 crore AUM as of September. With consumer demand back and SMEs looking to grow their businesses, demand is not a challenge for us. And with automation of our business, we aim to grow faster and plan to double from March this year to ₹2,400-2,500 crore by March end 2023,” said Shah.
“We have moved from traditional underwriting to fully automated AI/ML-based underwriting and decision-making across branches. This has helped us reduce our turnaround time (TAT) from around 5—8 days five years ago to now 28-48 hours,” Shah added.
The investment business was founded in 1948 as CDC and changed its name to British International Investment in April 2022. It currently has approximately $2 billion in Indian assets under management. Globally, it has made investments totaling little under £7 billion (or about 69,620 crores) during the previous five years.
Kinara is a non-banking financial corporation (NBFC) run by Visage Holdings and Finance Pvt. Ltd. that was established by Shah more than ten years ago. It has 125 branches and is present in six states. In the upcoming year, it hopes to expand into either Madhya Pradesh or Rajasthan.
