B2B finance firm Rupifi banks $4.1m in funding led by Quona Capital

March 30, 2021

The buy-now-pay-flexibly platform for micro, small and medium enterprises, Rupifi raised $4.1m in a pre-Series A round.

The pre-Series A funding was led by Quona Capital. Ankur Capital along with Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal also participated in the round.

The platform will use the funds raised to augment its partnerships, product offerings and scale its team.

The pre-Series A round comes a year after the startup raised an undisclosed sum as part of a pre-seed round which was backed by BharatPe’s Ashneer Grover, Cred’s Kunal Shah, Livspace’s Ramakant Sharma, Better Capital, and AngelList Syndicate Cloud Capital.

Launched last year by Anubhav Jain, Ankit Singh and Jawaid Iqbal, the company aims to address India’s credit gap of over $330bn which was caused by the inability of traditional lenders to integrate digital lending structures needed to reach SMEs.

The company offers MSMEs access to multiple lenders, underwrites the loans offered to MSMEs and provides them with flexible payment options where interest is calculated only on the number of days they use the credit.

Speaking about its platform, Jain said, “We’ve all become used to the Buy Now, Pay Laters of the world like Klarna and Affirm. But MSMEs don’t need lengthy instalment plans, they need access to small loans/credit lines they can pay back at variable time periods, based on their resale of the items they buy. For many, this may be as quick as ‘buy now, pay next week’ or ‘buy now, pay next day’—but when they don’t have access to credit for even the shortest of terms, those MSMEs fail to grow.

“Digital B2B transactions are growing at an unprecedented pace and we are here to provide the much-needed pillar of support in the form of flexible credit.”

Echoing a similar sentiment, Quona Capital co-founder and managing partner Ganesh Rengaswamy added, “Rupifi’s solution rides on several digital rails including Open Credit Enablement Network, B2B commerce and card issuance to lower risk while serving high-frequency, low-ticket-size transactions that enable MSMEs to expand and grow. The innovation of Buy Now, Pay Flexibly has long been needed in this market, and we are excited to back the Rupifi team as they reimagine MSME commerce in India.”