Florintree buys minority stake in app-based loan provider CASHe

Industry:    2017-04-02

Florintree Advisors, a Mumbai-based alternative asset management firm owned by Mathew Cyriac, former senior MD and India co-head of private equity at Blackstone Group LP, has acquired a minority stake in app-based loan provider CASHe.

V. Raman Kumar, chairman of Aeries Financial Technologies Pvt. Ltd which runs CASHe said the firm raised Rs25 crore in the Series A round.

Pulak Ghosh, a professor at the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore, and Cyriac have joined the Aeries board following the funding.

After working 11 years with Blackstone, Cyriac left the American PE fund in February and bought a controlling stake in Florintree. Set up in 2010 by founder Chidambaram Palaniappan, and K. Madhavan, joint managing director of Star TV India, Florintree Advisors invested Rs22 crore in Hyderabad-based Palred Technologies Ltd (formerly Four Soft Ltd) in March.

“We provide immediate short-term personal loans up to Rs1 lakh to young professionals based on their social profile and earning potential and not on CIBIL scores,” Kumar said.

According to him, the firm will expand its loan book to Rs2,500-3,000 crore in the next 18 months from the current size of Rs1,000 crore.

“We have plans to raise Series B funding worth Rs100 crore by the end of this year or early next year,” Kumar added.

He is the founder and former chairman of Nasdaq-listed MModal Inc. (formerly CBay Systems), a voice recognition, healthcare document technology firm which was sold to One Equity Partners (PE arm of JP Morgan) for $1 billion in 2012. At present, Kumar is an active investor in a number of ventures across India, the Middle East, and the US.

In the recent past, several PE and banking veterans have seen non-banking finance companies (NBFCs) in India as an attractive investment destination.

Last year, a group of financial services industry veterans, including Sanjay Nayar (CEO, KKR India), Narayan Seshadri (former head of Andersen Business Consulting in India), Anil Jaggia (former chief investment officer at HDFC Bank Ltd) and Vikram Sud (former head of operations at Citibank), had acquired digital lending platform FlexiLoan Technologies Ltd for Rs100 crore through their NBFC named Epimoney Pvt. Ltd.

Last October, Gopal Srinivasan, chairman and managing director of TVS Capital Funds, and Narayan Seshadri had acquired a majority stake in Bengaluru-based wealth management firm International Money Matters Pvt. Ltd.

InCred Finance, the Mumbai-based NBFC founded by Bhupinder Singh, former Asia-Pacific head of investment banking, Deutsche Bank, secured Rs500 crore ($75 million) worth funding led by Anshu Jain, former co-CEO of Deutsche Bank, PE firms and angel investors, last year.

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