National, 19 March 2025: Rural-fintech Navadhan has raised Series A equity funding round with
its initial target of 80 Cr oversubscribed to 111 Cr. The round is led by NabVentures,
the venture Capital arm of NABARD. Prime Ventures is the co-lead with participation
from LNB Group, also an LP in VC funds/ AIFs investing in tech startups. Other existing
investors also doubled down – Varanium NexGen Fintech Fund, Gemba Capital, Faad,
VC-Grid and Anicut.
In the last 3 years, Navadhan has closed 4 funding rounds. The new 111 Cr Series-A funding will
be used to fuel business growth and enhance the company’s AceN tech platform. It already has over 700 Cr of debt lines available from more than
25 Bank/ NBFCs onboarded on its AceN platform which enables API integrations.
Navadhan is co-founded by Nitin Agrawal along with 3 teammates – Amit
Biswal, Vijay Haswani and Anirudh Ramakuru, each with 15-25 years of experience
in financial services domain. They developed the AceN tech platform that facilitates working
capital financing to rural small businesses (MSMEs). MSMEs is a big focus area
for the government to enhance employment generation at local level in rural and
semi-urban areas.
Speaking on the fundraise, Nitin
Agrawal, Founder of Navadhan said: “We
are happy to find investors who share our mission of creating new-wealth
(Nava-dhan) for the rural-preneurs. At an early stage, Tech investors helped us
in building the AceN tech platform. We are very excited now to have NabVentures
since rural-MSMEs is our core customer segment. Also, happy to have support
from LNB family office with a vantage of running seasoned businesses in India.”
NabVentures comes from NABARD’s ecosystem
which is India’s apex development bank aimed at promoting sustainable and
equitable agriculture and rural development. Ashish Choudhary, CIO of NabVentures said: “Navadhan has demonstrated
a calibrated growth of 12x in the last
3 years while maintaining good asset quality. Building the AceN Tech platform
alongside has helped them do Co-lending seamlessly to break the barriers in
leveraging capital far more efficiently compared to traditional NBFCs.”
“We’re pleased to continue to back
Nitin and the Navadhan team to serve rural small businesses at scale.
Navadhan’s AceN tech platform is one of the more advanced tech platforms that
builds on top of IndiaStack to provide differentiated underwriting capabilities
and this has played out in the performance metrics of Navadhan”, said Sanjay
Swamy, Managing Partner, Priven Advisors, Advisory to Prime Venture Partners
Aparajit Bhandarkar of Varanium
NexGen said: “With the power of data science,
Navadhan's proprietary alternative underwriting model assesses the digital
footprint and cash flow surrogates. This solves the lack of income proofs and limited banking track record in the predominantly cash-based economy to enable credible lending
to nano entrepreneurs across rural and semi-urban markets.”
Amit Mehta of LNB Group said: “We believe that Navadhan has the right founder-market
fit to build a business towards an IPO. We like the focus on building the capital
efficient lending network, especially in the priority sector lending space. We are coming into the company at a crucial stage when the business is poised
for sustainable growth for many years to come.”
Navadhan has both people and Tech on the ground with a brick to
click model, critical build for scale where trust and collection efficiencies
are key to success. This startup team invested the first two years in building
the AceN tech platform before starting lending operations. AceN has
full-service customer fulfilment workflows with a paperless, seamless customer journey from on-boarding,
underwriting, servicing to multi-mode collections. AceN also has proprietary data
sciences backed tech-tools embedded into its workflows. Navadhan’s own NBFC
licence has played a crucial role in ensuring regulatorily compliant workflows.
Navadhan has grown its presence in 700 PIN codes across 5 states of MP, Rajasthan,
Gujarat, Karnataka and Odisha. It plans to go deeper in geographies and
diversify its loan offerings.
About Navadhan:
Navadhan Capital Private Limited (Navadhan) is Rural-Fintech
startup with an NBFC licence from RBI. Navadhan was founded by industry
veteran, Nitin Agrawal, along with co-founders Vijay Haswani, Anirudh Ramakuru,
Amit Biswal. The team brings together extensive experience in financial
services, credit risk, business development, finance partnerships and
technology. Navadhan aspires to become the largest finance platform for Rural
India by connecting NBFCs/Banks with Small Businesses/ Microenterprises (MSMEs)
through the sourcing and servicing of financial services.
About NabVentures:
NABVENTURES is a venture growth equity fund that invests in
agriculture, food, rural businesses and agri/rural financial services at early
to mid-stage. They are focused on driving transformation in these industries by
providing strategic and operational insights, patient capital and access to NABARD’s
extensive network. NABVENTURES Limited acts as a Sponsor and Investment Manager
of NABVENTURES Fund- I scheme I, a SEBI-registered close-ended Category II
Alternate Investments Fund (AIF).
About Prime VP:
Prime Venture Partners is one of India’s leading early-stage
venture capital firms, based in Bangalore and led by Sanjay Swamy, Shripati
Acharya, and Amit Somani. Over the past 12 years, Prime has invested in more
than 50 startups, including WheelsEye, MyGate, Quizizz, PlanetSpark, Dozee,
Zuper, Niyo, OTO, Knight Fintech, Finagg, and Navadhan, among others. The firm
has successfully exited investments such as Happay (acquired by Cred), Recko
(acquired by Stripe), Ezetap (acquired by Razorpay), and the IPO of Tracxn.
Prime Venture Partners is often the first institutional investor in
category-defining tech startups, supporting them from early-Product Market Fit
(PMF) through the growth-stage, and up to their exit or IPO. Prime recently
announced their Fifth Fund of $100M
About LNB group:
LNB is a 100-year-old diversified business
group with interests in Financial Services, Farming, Agri Supply Chain, Tea
Plantations, Renewable Energy, Textiles and Manufacturing. The Group has been
participating in the Alternate Investments space, both through Funds and Direct
for almost 15 years. Sustainability is an area of focus for LNB. The Group has
presence in India, East Africa and Singapore.