All five existing investors of Fairassets have also participated in the first round of Series A funding by the P2P lender. Its current investors include former Infosys board member TV Mohandas Pai, fomer Yahoo India MD Arun Tadanki, Former Nestle executive Nandu Nandkishore, serial entrepreneur Kshitij Jain and Singapore-based M&S partners.
“Right now, it’s a financial investment, we are not getting into a synergistic tie-up,” Rajat Gandhi, Founder, Faircent, “The money that comes in will be used to build a technology platform.”
Both JM Financial and Faircent did not disclose the value of its investment.
The Gurgaon-based company had earlier received Rs 1.5 crore in its pre-Series A funding round from Singapore-based M&S Partners Pte Ltd in June last year. It had also raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Devesh Sachdev and Ashish Tiwaripromoters of Fusion Microfinance in January last year.
Fairassets Technologies India is engaged in the business of operating a web portal and mobile application by the name of “Faircent.com” which provides a virtual peer to peer lending marketplace.
Online P2P lending companies work as marketplaces that bring individual borrowers and lenders together for loan transactions without the intervention of traditional financial institutions such as banks and non-banking finance companies.
The startup was founded in 2013 by Rajat Gandhi, Vinay Mathews and Nitin Gupta. The start-up helps individuals borrow money from individual lenders at low interest rates. The firm earns revenues by charging a one-time listing fee from borrowers and lenders.
The platform also has a tieup with Transunion to leverage its data analytics and algorithmic underwriting technology.
The firm’s platform facilitates loans of around Rs 1 crore a month and has over 27,000 registered borrowers and lenders. With over 6000 registered lenders Faircent is adding upwards of 3000 borrowers every month.
Recently, the banking regulator has taken steps to regulate P2P lending in India. In the discussion paper which is open for feedback till May 31, the central bank has proposed registering P2P lending platforms as NBFCs.
“The discussion paper is cryptic; it’s at a 36,000 feet level where it says that these are the risks,” Gandhi said.
Source: The Economic Times