NBFC firm Digikredit Finance Pvt. Ltd, which operates and lends under the brand name SMEcorner, has raised 90 crore from Accion Frontier Inclusion Fund managed by Quona Capital and Accion Venture Lab.

It intends to use the new round of funding for geographical expansion with 40 new tier-2 and tier 3 cities targeted in the next one year. The funds shall also be utilised to further simplify the technology front for its customers.

With that, SMEcorner has raised around ₹200 crore in debt and equity and plans to raise another ₹300 crore by the end of next fiscal.

SMEcorner, which obtained its NBFC license in February 2018, is present across 13 centres across 9 cities in 3 states in India with an employee strength of over 450.

The company offers small ticket-size loans worth ₹50,000 to ₹25 lakh for a period of 6 to 36 months and has disbursed over ₹225 crore in the last one year.

“A large segment of our customers are retailers such as kirana stores, electrical shops, readymade garment sellers, chemists, etc who are the under-financed section of our society. Recently, UPI and GST have led this segment to formalize and digitize their businesses. It is now seeking new avenues of funds to its fuel growth. We plan to use the new funds raised to add over 9000 customers and disburse over Rs 1000 crore of loans by March 2020,” said Samir Bhatia, Founder and CEO, SMEcorner.

SMEcorner uses a combination of proprietary application score card, OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and other forms of artificial intelligence to take a credit call.

SMEcorner claims to have brought down the loan approval turnaround time to an average of 3 days as against traditional banks that take in excess of 2 weeks with the help of technology.

Priyanka.pani@thehindu.co.in

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