Neobanking platform, Chqbook, on Thursday said that it has raised ₹40 crore as a part of its Pre-Series B round led by existing investor Aavishkaar Capital and the Rajiv Dadlani Group.
The equity round also saw participation from Earlsfield Capital UK, and reputed family offices and high networth investors including Jeremy Lim, Bhupesh Kumar, Nilesh Srivastava, and others.
Chqbook will use the capital to ramp up its user acquisition and strengthen its technology platform.
Founded in 2017, Chqbook provides small business owners access to current accounts, bookkeeping service for cash transactions, along with credit and insurance.
It launched its neo-banking platform in September, last year and has crossed 1 million app downloads with over 650,000 transacting customers for the service. The Chqbook app now processes over ₹3,000 crore in annualized transaction value.
“Through 2020, we built our multi-product stack and launched products which are now witnessing huge demand from the small business community. This has given us the confidence to double down and provide our customers access to banking, credit, and insurance. Across the country, over the next ten years, we expect small businesses to grow exponentially,” said Vipul Sharma, founder and chief executive officer, Chqbook.
“At Chqbook, we are committed to solving for this community and aim to lend over ₹300 billion, open 1 million accounts, and insure 10 million customers, over the next few years. Early days yet, but the accounts, credit, and insurance gap are so wide that the opportunity will require multiple players to join this movement,” added Sharma.
Chqbook had recently raised ₹75 million of venture debt from Innoven Capital, to ramp up its lending operations.
“The founders having a strong pedigree and tremendous collective experience in the fintech, banking, insurance industry, have built a robust management team and are doing a splendid job. There is a huge, inherent and unmet need for Chqbook’s products amongst small business owners, all over India. We are very impressed with their holistic strategy of leveraging technology and being a multi-product and multilingual app, which is truly complementing,” said investor Rajiv Dadlani.
In March 2020, Aavishkaar Capital had invested ₹35 crore as a part of the first institutional funding round in the company.
