Navadhan, a rural fintech startup has raised a Series A funding round with its initial target of ₹80 crore oversubscribed to ₹111 crore. The round is led by NabVentures, the venture capital arm of NABARD.
Prime Ventures is the co-lead with participation from LNB Group, also an LP in VC funds/ AIFs investing in tech startups. Other existing investors also doubled down – Varanium NexGen Fintech Fund, Gemba Capital, Faad, VC-Grid and Anicut.
In the last 3 years, Navadhan has closed 4 funding rounds.
The fresh funds raised will be used to fuel business growth and enhance its AceN tech platform.
Nitin Agrawal, Founder of Navadhan said, “We are happy to find investors who share our mission of creating new-wealth (Nava-dhan) for the rural-preneurs. At an early stage, Tech investors helped us in building the AceN tech platform. We are very excited now to have NabVentures since rural-MSMEs is our core customer segment. Also, happy to have support from LNB family office with a vantage of running seasoned businesses in India.”
Ashish Choudhary, CIO of NabVentures said, “Navadhan has demonstrated a calibrated growth of 12x in the last 3 years while maintaining good asset quality. Building the AceN Tech platform alongside has helped them do Co-lending seamlessly to break the barriers in leveraging capital far more efficiently compared to traditional NBFCs.”
“We’re pleased to continue to back Nitin and the Navadhan team to serve rural small businesses at scale. Navadhan’s AceN tech platform is one of the more advanced tech platforms that builds on top of IndiaStack to provide differentiated underwriting capabilities and this has played out in the performance metrics of Navadhan,” said Sanjay Swamy, Managing Partner, Priven Advisors, Advisory to Prime Venture Partners.
Aparajit Bhandarkar of Varanium NexGen said, “With the power of data science, Navadhan’s proprietary alternative underwriting model assesses the digital footprint and cash flow surrogates. This solves the lack of income proofs and limited banking track record in the predominantly cash-based economy to enable credible lending to nano entrepreneurs across rural and semi-urban markets.”
Amit Mehta of LNB Group said, “We believe that Navadhan has the right founder-market fit to build a business towards an IPO. We like the focus on building the capital efficient lending network, especially in the priority sector lending space. We are coming into the company at a crucial stage when the business is poised for sustainable growth for many years to come.”
Founded in 2019 by Nitin Agrawal, Amit Biswal, Vijay Haswani and Anirudh Ramakuru, Navadhan Capital is a rural fintech startup with an NBFC licence from RBI.
They developed the AceN tech platform that facilitates working capital financing for rural small businesses (MSMEs). AceN has full-service customer fulfilment workflows with a paperless, seamless customer journey from onboarding, underwriting, and servicing to multi-mode collections. AceN also has proprietary data sciences backed tech-tools embedded into its workflows.
Navadhan already has over 700 crores of debt lines available from more than 25 Bank/ NBFCs onboarded on its AceN platform which enables API integrations. Navadhan has its presence in 700 PIN codes across 5 states of MP, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Karnataka and Odisha.
