Published: 3/16/2021
Good afternoon, it's Tuesday and we're back to our regularly scheduled programming. Vedica and I were off on the weekend hence the no newsletter yesterday. And today, do we have a bunch of fintech news- India's favorite fintech company is in the midst of a fundraise and an embedded fintech infrastructure company raising their Series B
➡️ While everyone is busying debating CRED's business model and complaining about their unused CRED coins, the company has been busy building and raising capital. According to TechCrunch's sources, the company is in advanced talks to raise up to $200M in a new round that would value the company at a whopping $2B.
➡️ The new round will likely be financed by CRED's existing backers as they don't want to give up ownership to new investors, but Falcon Edge (according to ET) is in talks to participate in the round as well. The company has been on a funding spree in the last 6 months with their Series C which valued the company at $800M (up from $450M in 2019) last November.
➡️ I have written about CRED and their business model extensively in the past so won't repeat myself too much, but CRED has updates on it's users- a total of 5.9M users on the platform with roughly 60% using the platform on a monthly basis (according to The Morning Context).
➡️ Financial Products (Lending) and Commerce (Marketplace + CRED Pay) seem to be what the company is going to be focussed on as they have certainly cracked distribution amongst the cream of India's consumer market.
➡️ The round is also not super surprising in today's funding climate- Investors are under pressure to deploy capital as dry powder in the Industry has gone up significantly with fewer companies being founded / fewer funding opportunities presenting themselves. I would've imaged that CRED didn't even go out to raise this round but were pre-empted by their existing investors to take more capital and continue to grow and scale up its services as the Indian economy looks to rebound.
2. http://bit.ly/2OVvPNN: YAP raises a $10M Series B
➡️ In more fintech news, infrastructure company YAP has raised $10M in a new funding round co-led by Omidyar Network and Flourish Ventures with participation from existing investors Beenext, 8i Ventures and Better Capital.
➡️ YAP provides other companies the infrastructure to embed financial services within their applications- they currently serve companies in multiple geographies including India, Nepal, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, New Zealand and plan to expand to several others.
➡️ Some of YAP's customers are well-known consumer fintech companies like Slice and Walrus where the companies use YAP's APIs and SDKs to power lending and money movement. As more and more consumer companies start embedding financial services in their products, infrastructure providers like YAP and Setu will continue to thrive.
➡️ The real problem here is about getting traction and customers, a fintech exec I was talking to a couple weeks ago told me that the best companies understand that distribution for payments infrastructure is equally as important as the actual infrastructure they're providing- and this is where YAP has been able to do well.
Feedback & ❤️ always appreciated BONUS (Tweet of the day): https://twitter.com/getpostman/status/1371502680938577923
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