Online lending platform Avail Fin raises $17.2 mn to fund expansion plans

Equity investment firm Matrix Partners's India division has announced its investment in Avail Finance, a Bengaluru-based online lending platform.

In addition to Matrix Partners India, Bhavish Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati, Ola's co-founders, Binny Bansal, co-founder and group CEO of Flipkart, Kunal Shah, founder of Freecharge; and Manish Patel, founder and CEO of Mswipe, also participated in the funding round.

Founded in 2017, Avail Finance has raised a total of $17.2 million which includes debt and credit lines from multiple NBFCs. The company caters to India's blue-collared workforce, currently underserved by organised lending institutions.

With low credit card penetration and the lack of structured credit history, this large segment of the Indian population resorts to availing credit from informal sources at high interest rates. Leveraging alternate digital data and the power of the India stack (Aadhaar, eKYC, UPI), Avail aims to create a seamless lending and repayment process to serve this segment.

"By solving for the core of the problem in not having a credit history, using advanced technology, data sciences and artificial intelligence, we are bringing a new approach to an age-old problem. The huge chunk of people in the urban mass who are currently being ignored by the formal lending sector will stand to benefit from Avail's solutions," said Avail Finance founder and CEO, Ankush Aggarwal.