Caspian Debt partners Villgro to provide debt access to early-stage startups

Caspian Debt, a digital corporate lending services company, has partnered with Chennai-based Villgro, an incubator of early-stage social enterprises, to provide debt solutions to start-ups that aim to create a positive social or environmental impact.

Villgro’s portfolio company, Bharat Rohan, a Lucknow-based Agri-tech startup was the recipient of the first loan of ₹25 lakh. Bharat Rohan uses unique UAV/drone based hyperspectral remote sensing and artificial intelligence in precision agriculture, integrated pest management and contract farming.

“Emerging social enterprises in India face the challenge of having limited access to debt due to the lack of credit history and an existing negative feedback nexus between credit history and access to debt. Through this partnership with Villgro, we will provide the first set of debts by the end of Q3 2021. We look forward to working closely with the team at Villgro to identify these promising start-ups,” S Viswanatha Prasad, Managing Director, Caspian Debt.

“Invention based enterprises face a near impossible task of accessing capital during their early days. This partnership is built on the insight that it only needs a small amount of capital to catalyse business operations, and that credit risk can be reduced using innovative methods to enable access to this capital,” said Srinivas Ramanujam, CEO Villgro India.