Aye Finance raises additional $27.5m amid pandemic

Against the economic slowdown caused by the coronavirus, Indian FinTech Yes Finance Wednesday, June 24, said it raised $27.5 million from a group of investors led by the private equity arm of Alphabet, Google’s parent company.

The Gurgaon-based startup, which built a digital lending platform for small businesses, caught on Twitter to announce the news of the cash injection by Alphabet’s CapitalG, along with current investors A91 Partners, MAJ Invest, LGT Lightstone and Falcon Edge Capital, who also contributed.

The startup raised $91 million in its six years in business and is now valued at more than $250 million, according to a report in The Economic Times citing a regulatory filing.

“Difficult times are a real test for a good lender and we have already started to show significant improvements in customer repayments over the past few months,” Aye Finance managing director Sanjay Sharma told the London-based newspaper. mumbai.

The capital injection comes as Aye Finance prepares to resume lending in July to small businesses. Like many Indian businesses, Aye was forced to shut down operations in March under a nationwide lockdown aimed at preventing the spread of COVID-19.

Aye focuses on real small businesses that have yet to be formally organized, determining creditworthiness with predictive analytics and statistical models. To date, the company said it has helped 200,000 small businesses work through the loan pipeline.

Late last year, Aye Finance announced that it had raised $14 million blue orchid. This followed an $16.8 million financing deal a few weeks earlier with FMO, a Dutch development bank, as well as an $8 million debt financing last August from DCB Bank.

“Micro-enterprise lending has been a road less traveled for banks and finance companies and so it is satisfying to have established an innovative paradigm of our lending approach,” Sharma said at the time. “Aye’s team has demonstrated that the robustness of our cluster-based lending approach has resulted in the inclusion of nearly 200,000 micro-enterprises using this approach.”

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