Capital Float raises $50 mn to scale up buy-now-pay-later platform in India

Capital Float, the buy-now-pay-later platform, on Tuesday said that it has raised $50 million in equity funding led by Lightrock India. Current investors Sequoia Capital India, Ribbit Capital, Creation Investments and Dinesh Hinduja family office also participated in the round, in addition to new investors David Vélez, founder of Nubank, Kunal Shah, founder of Cred, and Amrish Rau, CEO of Pine Labs.

The funds raised will be used to strengthen and scale Capital Float’s BNPL platform and expand its partner ecosystem. The company has witnessed rapid growth over the past year, with 2.5 million customers now using its product to finance over Rs 2,000 crore of online purchases annually. Capital Float has partnered with leading platforms such as Amazon (powering Amazon Paylater), MakeMyTrip, Unacademy, and BoAt to help consumers finance purchases across e-commerce, D2C brands, travel, edtech and healthcare. Recently it also launched a strategic partnership with Razorpay to expand BNPL to over 100,000 merchants across the country.

“We are now financing 2 million purchases every month across 14,000 pin codes, while maintaining NPAs (non performing assets) below 1.5 per cent,” said co-founders Sashank Rishyasringa and Gaurav Hinduja. “This positions us the market leader in BNPL in India today. We see an exponential growth opportunity ahead from this point on.”

By solving for affordability as well as convenience, in a fully-regulated format, the founders said that the company’s BNPL approach can responsibly expand access to credit to over 100 million customers who are starting to transact online. “We are privileged to have the support of our investors in pursuing this vision, and are excited to work in partnership to build out a world-class digital financial institution for India,” said Rishyasringa and Hinduja.

Saleem Asaria, partner at Lightrock India, said that in addition to its strong technology platform, Capital Float has built a sophisticated underwriting and collections capability, along with an ethical lending playbook, that makes the model very compelling. “We have also been consistently impressed with the tenacity and execution focus of the team through a full credit cycle,” said Asaria. “We are excited to work with the team to build a highly scalable, differentiated, and sustainable business that will positively impact the lives of millions of customers in India through digital credit and financial products.”

In addition to offering BNPL at checkouts across its merchant partners, the company also operates Walnut, a personal finance app with over 12 million lifetime downloads. Walnut offers a range of personal finance features such as expense tracking, budgeting, and bill reminders. It also provides instant small-ticket loans to salaried and self-employed individuals 24x7, and recently launched insurance options on the app as well.