Full-stack financial services provider, WeRize, on Wednesday said it has raised $8 million as a part of its Series A funding round, led by 3one4 Capital, Picus Capital, Kalaari Capital, and Orios Ventures.
Two-year-old WeRize, started by former Lendingkart executives, claims to be a full-stack provider, both developing and distributing a wide portfolio of customised credit, group insurance and savings products.
The startup leverages a social distribution model for financial products. According to the company, it has empowered thousands of financially literate and digitally savvy freelancers to sell financial products in their social circle.
The tech platform enables social partners to source business through online and offline channels, recommend the right financial product to their customers as well as provide after-sales support.
The company currently caters to customers across 1,000 Indian cities and towns and plans to reach over 4,000 towns in the next two years through its social distribution strategy.
“We are creating a new category in the Indian financial services space; a socially distributed full stack financial services platform for 4000 small towns of India. The full stack approach of owning both the product and the distribution gives us unique insights about our customer segment that becomes an unbeatable competitive advantage,” said Vishal Chopra, co-founder, WeRize.
Social distribution has so far allowed WeRize to collect over 1 billion data points across 500,000 families in 1.000 cities, the company said. WeRize leverages insights from these data points to create customised credit, group insurance, and savings products.
“Vishal and Himanshu bring to the table all the necessary know-how and experience to build India’s first socially distributed full stack financial services brand for families in small town India. Small town India needs a very different set of products than is currently made available by incumbent players and a distribution model that solves the unique challenges that exist in these markets,” said Rajesh Raju, managing partner at Kalaari Capital.
WeRize claims to be profitable operationally, and is on target to become earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) positive by early 2022. The company has witnessed a 10-fold year-on-year growth in its revenues.
“Financial services for 4000 small towns in India is a space that has been largely untouched due to the complex nature of the space. Vishal and Himanshu have been working on this space for two years to build a lean, efficient approach to solving the problem for 300 million Indians,” said Anurag Ramdasan, partner at 3one4 Capital.
Source: Mint