Fintech lender Aye Finance on Wednesday said announced a ₹210 crore in Series E funding, led by CapitalG, Alphabet’s independent growth fund. The round also saw participation from Aye’s existing investors LGT Lightstone, Falcon Edge Capital, A91 Partners and MAJ Invest. With this, Aye’s total equity funding since inception exceeds ₹690 crore.
The company focuses on solving funding-related problems of small businesses that typically rely on informal sources of financing such as money lenders and chit funds.
This funding recognises the traction Aye Finance is seeing in the market as a disruptive micro-enterprise lender. Since its inception in 2014, Aye has disbursed ₹3,000 crore, transforming the MSME lending landscape and brought over 200,000 unorganised businesses into the formal lending ecosystem.
The fintech lender deploys advanced statistical models and predictive analytics to make robust risk selection that work even in the absence of formal business documents and prior credit histories. Despite disruptions brought on by the onset of covid-19 that hit the MSME sector, Aye has shown improving operating ratios in the first quarter of FY21 on the back of its quality lending book, the startup said.
“Closing major funding round during these times of economic uncertainty reinforces the value that our investors see in Aye Finance…our loans are underwritten with cluster insights and this continues to assure good repayment behavior in our portfolio,” said Sanjay Sharma, managing director, Aye Finance.
“Aye Finance’s continued success is a testament to their industry leadership, their underwriting methodology, which combines an optimal mix of data science with physical presence in the field, and their ability to empower a huge, unaddressed market,” said Sumiran Das, board member and partner at CapitalG.
