Lendingkart, dedicated to helping entrepreneurs and small businesses with short-term working capital loans, is in talks with large fund houses to raise $25 million by June/July.

“We received our last round of funding of $6 million this March at a valuation of $20 million and are in talks to raise $25 million at a valuation of $80 million,” Harshvardhan Lunia, co-founder and CEO, Lendingkart, told BusinessLine .

For expansion

Having raised $9.5 million ($7 million in equity and $2.5 million in debt) since its inception in April last year, the start-up is looking to raise fresh funds to up its loan disbursements by six times a month, build a 46-member technology team for e-commerce lending, set up a 10-member team for analytics and to fund its operations.

Lendingkart has partnered with e-commerce marketplaces Flipkart and Snapdeal to provide hassle-free, working capital loans to their sellers and has recently started working with fashion and lifestyle e-tailer Jabong to do the same. Loans ranging from ₹60,000 to ₹40 lakh are sanctioned in a day and money disbursed within two days of being sanctioned.

“We decided to lend to small and medium businesses in the e-commerce vertical because e-tailers can provide us with enough of online transaction data and other details of their sellers such as quality of products/services, health of business, ability to compete, which helps us assess their credit-worthiness and sanction loans quickly through our proprietary self-learning, machine-learning algorithm that is fully automated for credit scoring,” said Lunia, adding that banks and NBFCs demand collateral, net worth details, IT return statements and much more from SMBs, which are cumbersome to provide the same.

Lendingkart has reduced its decision making time to sanction loans from 48 hours last year to 4 hours today. The start-up disburses 70 short-term loans every month, for which it charges 1.5–2 per cent interest a month.

“We are targeting 400 loans a month in six months and can serve SMBs in Tier-2 and -3 towns across the country,” said Lunia.

Headquartered in Ahmedabad with a total team size of 50 employees who are bankers, data scientists, ISB and IIM graduates, Lendingkart was co-founded by Lunia and Mukul Sachan who is COO.

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