Ahmedabad-based digital lending platform, Lendingkart, announced that it has raised $76 million (approximately Rs 500 crore) in a Series C funding round. The round was led by Fullerton Financial, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Temasek Holdings and saw participation from the Singapore-based fund, Sistema Asia.

Over the past four years, the startup has raised approximately $173 million, inclusive of the latest round of funding. In 2017, the company had raised $11 million in a pre-series C round. In September 2017, Lendingkart was geared up to raise $80 million and had appointed Credit Suisse as its investment banker for the deal.

“We plan to use the funds to expand our loan book considerably and also use it to strengthen our technology platform in order to be able to cater to a larger clientele,” Harshvardhan Lunia, Co-founder of Lendingkart Technologies said.

Lunia also stated that the startup would be open to partnering with other players in the lending segment to cater to the diverse credit needs of their consumers. “While we are not looking at entering into home loans and other products at present, we can partner with different banks or NBFCs to source customers for them and meet our borrower’s various credit needs,” he said. With the influx of funds, Lunia is also looking to invest more money into the technological aspect of Lendingkart so as to sell the software as a service and thereby generate revenues through it.

Lendingkart was founded in 2014 by Lunia and Mukul Sachan and is a digital instant working capital platform that provides easy access to credit and working capital to SMEs. The startup claims to have been able to capture data across 200 million data points via over 1,00,000 applicants and 4,50,000 registered users. It also claims to have disbursed over 20,000 loans in more than 950 cities, thereby helping out SMEs across 23 sectors. Lendingkart exclusively lends to micro, small, and medium enterprises. The startup is backed by prominent investors including Bertelsmann India Investment, Darrin Capital Management, Sistema Asia Fund, and India Quotient.

(Picture courtesy: www.bertelsmann.com)