Lending startup Flexiloans, which provides loans to India’s micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), has secured Rs 375 crore (nearly $44 million) in fresh equity funding as a part of an extended Series C round, a top executive told VCCircle.
The latest infusion brings the total raised in the Series C round to Rs 665 crore. It comes around nine months after the startup raised Rs 290 crore in September 2024 from global impact investors Accion and Nuveen, along with Nandan Nilekani’s venture capital firm Fundamentum and existing backer Maj Invest, a Denmark-based private equity firm.
In the latest tranche, Flexiloans secured capital from existing investors–Fundamentum, Accion Digital Transformation, Nuveen, and Maj Invest–while the UK’s development finance institution British International Investment (BII) came on board as a new investor, co-founder Deepak Jain said.
“The funding comes in the backdrop of solid performance by Flexiloans in the current state of markets. We’ve been growing at a CAGR of roughly 80% in the last four years,” said Jain.
The round involved a mix of primary and secondary capital, with a few of the early investors taking partial exits, Jain added, without disclosing the names of the individual investors or the company’s valuation in the latest round.
In June 2022, the company raised $30 million (Rs 256 crore) in equity in a Series B round, and another $60 million from UK-based venture capitalist Fasanara Capital, Maj Invest, and Caravel Group chairman Harry Banga’s family office. In October 2020, it raised $20.2 million in a mix of equity and debt from investors, including the family office of Falguni Nayar and husband Sanjay Nayar.
Its earliest capital raise was in 2016, the year it was set up, from marquee investors such as Sanjay Nayar, former CEO of KKR India, and Vikram Sud, former head of operations and technology at Citibank, among others.
The new funding will be used to expand operations, enhance product offerings, and strengthen technology infrastructure.
Founded by Jain (previously an investment banker at Axis Capital), along with fellow Indian School of Business alumni Manish Lunia (former executive at Aditya Birla Group), Ritesh Jain (former finance chief of Housing.com), and Abhishek Kothari (a data science and analytics professional), the company has since raised Rs 746 crore in equity and over Rs 2,000 crore in debt.
It uses alternative data from e-commerce and payment platforms to assess credit risk. It currently manages more than Rs 2,000 crore in AUM. “The capital will go towards increasing our leverage and furthering our loan book growth,” Jain said. “This capital should be good enough for us to now scale to at least Rs 5,000 crore in assets under management in about 18 months.”
Flexiloans offers term loans (ranging from Rs 2 lakh to Rs 25 lakh) and supply chain finance (from Rs 25 lakh to Rs 10 crore) through its own NBFC and a network of lending partners integrated into its platform. It has a presence in over 15,000 pincodes across India without any physical branches.
Further, the company is eyeing an initial public offering in FY28, around the time it targets reaching $1 billion in AUM.
In FY24, its revenue grew 2.4x to nearly Rs 262 crore, up from Rs 109 crore the year before. It has been profitable since FY23, although FY24 profits halved to Rs 3.03 crore, due to higher delinquency rates and increased operating expenses, trends seen across the broader lending industry.
