The brainchild of serial entrepreneur Kunal Shah, CRED, the popular credit card bill payment app, has announced a new $80 million Series F round. The round is led by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC. Existing backers Global, Sofina Ventures, Alpha Wave Ventures and Dragoneer also participated in this round.
A regulatory filing with the Registrar of Companies (RoC) shows that the digital payment platform has approved the issuance of 42,308 Compulsory Convertible Preference Shares Series F (CCPS) at an issue price of Rs 145,846.98 per share to raise $80 million. The same has now been officially announced by the company.
This would be CRED’s fourth round of funding in the past 18 months. The company started this cycle at an astonishing valuation of $6.4 billion. This is a 60% growth from the time of its Series E funding round, which totaled up to $251 million, when the company was valued at $4 billion.
CRED, the Bengaluru-based Fintech startup, is an app that allows users to pay their credit card bills online. Paying bills by credit card is no longer a complicated process since most banks have their online banking platforms and apps to do the same. But CRED has revolutionized the process by employing behavioral incentives. Instead of highlighting the aspects of late fees and interest rates, CRED offered its users incentives in the form of aggressive discounts and refund offers to pay their credit card bills on time. . Moreover, the company has also set up a community of its users who have a credit score of over 750, providing them with more awesome offers, fast unsecured loans and more. This community enjoys premium discounts in areas such as high-end hotel reservations and more. In the process, the company has been directly responsible for instilling better financial habits and money management tendencies in the people of India.
The company has approximately 7.5 million users and facilitates 25% of all credit card transactions. The company’s revenue increased to ₹88,000,000 in the 2021 financial year from ₹52,000,000 in the 2020 financial year. The company also reported a 45% increase in losses. Recently, CRED acquires the financial management company Happay, to give their own app a deeper use case compatible with their MSP. CRED is also in talks to acquire Smallcase, a platform that helps new and young entrants to the equity market to invest.
The investment comes at a time when startups around the world are struggling to fund themselves. While seed and Series A start-ups, especially Fintechs, have not been on the steepest slope, unicorn fintech PayTM reported a significant loss in its latest quarterly figures.