Avail Finance, based out of Bangalore which is a startup with a focus of lending to the blue collared workforce has received funding from Matrix Partners India plus a host of individuals, which includes, Bhavish Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati, Ola’s co-founders, Binny Bansal, co-founder and group CEO of Flipkart, Kunal Shah, founder of Freecharge; and Manish Patel, founder and CEO of Mswipe.
Till date, the startup has raised a total of $17.2 million and this has come in the form of debt and credit, both.
Avail is just about a year old and Ankush Aggarwal and Tushar Mehndiratta are the 2 co-founders and Avail Finance believes India’s blue collared workforce, are grossly underserved by the country’s traditional lending institutions. A majority among this category of the population may not be owning credit cards and therefore would be lacking a structured credit history, for the lenders to tap into before they approve any loans.
“With our mission of making credit available to anyone worthy of it, we at Avail, are looking to create an accessible financing and lending ecosystem in the country. By solving for the core of the problem in not having a credit history, using advanced technology, data sciences and artificial intelligence, we are bringing a new approach to an age-old problem. The huge chunk of people in the urban mass who are currently being ignored by the formal lending sector will stand to benefit from Avail’s solutions,” Ankush Aggarwal, Founder and CEO, Avail Finance said.
They may therefore end up borrowing from the unorganized sources, often at usurious rates of interest. Avail is trying to solve this by banking on some of the tools that have surfaced in the past few year, like Aadhaar, eKYC and UPI to build alternate data and help this huge segment of the community access credit.
“Consumer lending to the blue-collared workforce is a large, untapped and hard to solve opportunity. We are impressed by Avail’s differentiated sourcing and underwriting strategy, and are privileged to partner with Ankush and Tushar on their journey. We believe it’s still early days of the India Fin-tech story and will continue to invest in the space,” said Vikram Vaidyanathan, Managing Director, Matrix India.