Lendingkart raises Rs 565 cr

Fintech major Lendingkart Technologies today said it has raised over USD 87 million (Rs 565 crore) in equity funding, led by Singapore's Fullerton Financial Holdings (FFH).
Existing investors also participated in the latest round of the funding.
With this, Lendingkart Group's cumulative equity and debt raising will exceed USD 173 million (Rs 1,129 crore), of which USD 114 million was through equity route.
"The funds from this round will be used to further strengthen our technological and analytics capabilities," Lendingkart Technologies co-founder and CEO Harshvardhan Lunia told PTI.
He added that the company also plans to expand its credit product offerings to deepen its reach to small enterprises.

"We are pleased to collaborate with Fullerton as they bring deep domain experience... We look forward to leveraging their insights as we build a leading platform for digital lending in India," he said.

GAN Chee Yen, CEO of FFH, said the deployment of technology to develop scalable and accessible financial services platforms, incorporating big data analytics and machine learning, will be critical to any lending business serving the underbanked and underserved customers in India.
"We are committed to supporting Lendingkart Group on its journey to become a leading digital lender in India," he added.
FFH is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Temasek.

Credit Suisse acted as the exclusive financial advisor to Lendingkart Technologies.
Lendingkart Group has also signed a memorandum of understanding with Fullerton India Capital Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of FFH. This will provide both parties opportunities to collaborate on initiatives that complement their respective credit businesses, Lunia said.
Since its inception, Lendingkart Finance (the NBFC arm of Lendingkart Group) has evaluated more than one lakh applications, disbursed over 20,000 loans in more than 950 cities helping more than 13,000 SMEs.
Lendingkart uses technology tools based on big data analytics and machine learning algorithms to evaluate creditworthiness.
Thousands of data points are used to assess factors like financial health, comparative market performance, social reliability and compliance and disburse loans.