Grip Invest, a lease finance platform, has raised a pre-Series A funding round led by Chennai-based The Grand Anicut Angel Fund, a top executive told VCCircle.
The round also saw participation from Gemba Capital and angel investors Anupam Mittal, Sunjay Kapur and Maninder Gulati.
Set up in June, Grip lets investors purchase and lease assets to companies.
It was founded by Nikhil Aggarwal and Vivek Gulati. Prior to Grip, Aggarwal co-founded and served as operations chief of Chalo, a mobility startup for city buses.
He started his career at HSBC and then worked for six years with the investment banking team at Morgan Stanley, India. He also currently serves as a consultant to the transport practice at the World Bank.
Gulati was previously part of the business development team at Chalo and led business development for the expansion team for OYO Hotel’s domestic and international operations.
Aggarwal, chief executive officer of Grip, said, “In spite of the macro-environment, performance over the last few months has been encouraging. We continue to see 15% plus week-on-week growth in new investing users, close to 50% repeat investment rate as well as good traction for leasing opportunities, including with large ventures like Bounce, Rentomojo and Furlenco.”
The proceeds from the fundraise will be used to scale the platform.
IAS Balamurugan, partner at Anicut Capital, said, “Investment platforms are going through a rapid transformation in India. First, it was the growth of roboadvisory, stock trading and digital wealth platforms and the next wave is that of new investment products like Grip.”
Balamurugan added, “Given the innovation that has happened and is happening across fintech, we also see Grip’s business scaling faster as they leverage other online distribution platforms and the growing customer appetite and awareness for different types of investments.”
It’s a team of experienced, second-time founders who understand how to scale businesses and bring in relevant experience across finance, business development and organisation development, he said.
Anicut Angel Fund is a sector-agnostic equity fund platform for early-stage companies. It is sponsored by Anicut Capital which also manages two SME debt funds with an AUM (assets under management) of $100 million.
The Anicut angel platform has made six investments so far. Recently, it backed Deepsync Technologies Pvt. Ltd, a platform that uses artificial intelligence for content production by allowing creators to replicate their voice.