With Rs 45 crore loan book since inception, SlicePay raises $2 M in funding

On Friday, fintech company SlicePay announced it raised $2 million as a part of its ongoing Series A round.

Japan-based Das Capital, Russia-based Simile Ventures joined the round along with existing investor Blume Ventures.

SlicePay, earlier known as Buddy, is a micro-lending platform for students, which enables college-goers to buy products and services from e-commerce platforms on monthly payment plans.

The startup had last raised $500,000 in pre-Series A funds in February 2016 from Blume Ventures and Traxcn Labs with participation from a few other angel investors.

Rajan Bajaj, Co-founder of SlicePay said,

“We have been focused on building a playbook for risk and growth over the last couple of years, and this capital would now allow us to serve students in other parts of India for both their education and consumption related credit needs.”

He added, SlicePay has developed a strong data-driven risk model using alternative data points and the next phase of growth would be to expand to other cities and identify the right set of customers.

Shinji Kimura of Das Capital added,

“Being the first lender to an educated youngster in India and having robust banking partnerships to cater to their other lending-related needs as they grow gives SlicePay a unique advantage in the highly competitive lending landscape. We are very excited about this unique opportunity.”

SlicePay claims to have a loan book of close to Rs 45 crore since inception. It currently caters to more than 30,000 orders a month.

“Lending is a complex space and hence can be catered by sector specialists. Slicepay has been dealing with the young population that is largely underbanked, who needs assistance and will become the consumption drivers over the next 10-15 years,” said Ashish Fafadia from Blume Ventures.

Deepak Malhotra, co-founder of SlicePay says that in the last one year, the company had scaled operations across Chennai, Bengaluru and Vellore. He says,

“We have seen tremendous response from college students and collaboration cooperation from various top tier institutes. For instance, recently we have signed a MoU with IIT Madras to provide credit facilities to students in the form of credit for education and consumer goods & services and we look to extend the same opportunity to other institutes.”

Not the only player

However, SlicePay isn’t the only microlending startup in this space. There is also Bengaluru-based KrazyBee, which was launched in May 2016. The company received $2 million in June 2016 in from micro-loan/e-commerce player Fenqile (a micro-loan site) and Chinese mobile ad network YeahMobi. It is said to be closing its Series A round now.

However, with 700 universities and more than 35,000 affiliated colleges enrolling more than 20 million students, India offers a large opportunity for platforms targeting students.

In a market where around 25 percent of e-commerce is driven by students, many other micro-lending platforms are trying to create a niche.