Kinara Capital’s $25 million round led by British International Investment
- ByStartupStory | October 29, 2022
On Friday, small business lender Kinara Capital said that it had secured $25 million in a fundraising round headed by British International Investment, a development finance institution (DFI) from the UK (BII).
Existing investors Nuveen Global Impact Fund and ASN Microkredietfonds, a listed and licenced Dutch microfinance fund advised by Triple Jump, also participated in the round.
According to a statement from the firm, “This new equity investment will enable Kinara to grow 5x by 2025 as it strives to reach assets under management (AUM) of 6,000 crores by reaching formal financial inclusion via its myKinara app.”
Since its founding in 2011, the Bengaluru-based fintech company has raised a total of $90 million in equity, according to Hardika Shah, founder and CEO of Kinara Capital.
The MSME-focused lender most recently secured an equity round of 380 crores (about $50 million) in April of this year from two new international investors led by Nuveen Global Impact Fund and Dutch investor Triple Jump.
“As of September, we had already surpassed 1,700 crores AUM. Demand is not a problem for us because consumer demand has returned and SMEs want to expand their operations. We also want to expand more quickly, so we expect to automate our operation and double our revenue from this March to between $2,400 and $2,500 billion by the end of March 2023, added Shah.
We switched from manually reviewing applications to entirely automating underwriting and decision-making across branches using AI/ML. Since then, our turnaround time (TAT) has decreased from 5–8 days to 28–48 hours,” Shah continued.
The investment firm was founded in 1948 as CDC and changed its name to British International Investment in April 2022. It currently has a portfolio worth over $2 billion in India. It has made investments all over the world in the previous five years totalling about £7 billion (or 69,620 crores).
In India during the next five years, BII plans to contribute up to $1 billion in climate investment, as of last year. CDC has contributed more than $1 billion to climate finance in South Asia and Africa over the past four years.
According to Manav Bansal, Managing Director and Head of India, British International Investment, “BII seeks to invest in companies that demonstrate strong development impact capacity and offer tech-enabled innovative solutions with high potential for scalability, and Kinara Capital meets these criteria…
Kinara is a non-banking financial corporation (NBFC) run by Visage Holdings and Finance Pvt. Ltd. that was established by Shah more than ten years ago. It has 125 branches and is present in six states. In the upcoming year, it hopes to expand into either Madhya Pradesh or Rajasthan.
Shah added that Kinara anticipates its March 2018 profit of 14 crore rupees to increase by 2.5 to 3 times by March 2023. Kinara Capital last obtained debt funding from Invest in Visions GmbH in October of last year for 70 crores (IIV).
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