- Rupeek a gold-backed online lending platform raised $60 million in 2 funding rounds.
- The start-up is backed-up by GGV Capital, Bertelsmann India Investments, Binny Bansal, KB Investments Co. (KBIC), Tanglin Venture Partners, Sequoia India, and Accel Partners.
Rupeek an online leader that grants loans again gold jewelry and heirlooms recently raised $60 million from its investors.
“Our plan is to scale existing and newer channels for gold monetization. We will use the fresh funds to invest in technology, customer acquisition and work towards improving the accessibility of credit in the country.” – Sumit Maniyar – CEO Rupeek
A Short Introduction of Rupeek:
Rupeek was founded in 2015 that aims to offer gold-backed loan products by collecting and depositing the precious metal at the nearest branch of the partner banks that offered the loan.
The digital lending platform Rupeek currently operates in 10 cities including Bengaluru, Mumbai, New Delhi, Jaipur, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Surat, Mumbai, Coimbatore, and Pune.
“For India’s middle-class households, gold has long been a favorite way to save and invest. Rather than letting it sit idle, Rupeek has turned a family’s dormant asset into an easy way to get a loan at affordable rates to grow their small business or pay for emergency needs.” – Hans Tung a managing partner at GGV Capital.
In 2017, Rupeek raised $2 million in a seed round from Sequoia Capital. Then in 2018 another funding round led by Accel Partners and injected around $6.83 million in series A funding.
Last year, it secured $30 million a series B round led by Bertelsmann India Investments. Rupeek is also supported by some India’s largest banks like Federal Bank and Karur Vysya Bank which are eager o diversify their portfolios.
It’s newest offering gold overdraft allows users to store their gold beforehand, take out a loan against it anytime, then repay at will with interest.
“Their strong customer proposition and approach of partnering with banks is truly a gamechanger for the unorganized gold loan space in India” – Binny Bansal – co-founder Flipkart and Xto10X Technologies.
Is Rupeek’s Vision Worth $60 million Funding?
When we get to hear strong investors like Sequoia, Accel, Tanglin, Bertelsmann, and others investing together in an idea, it is definitely worth it (maybe much more than that).
“Rupeek has identified a key problem of availability and accessibility to credit to the self-employed sector in a market like India. The amount of satisfactory gold in India opens up the opportunity in terms of monetization and distribution” – Anand Daniel, partner at Accel Partners.
Rupeek is moving ahead with high hopes and plans to expand to 100 cities in the next 2 years. Rupeek’s goal is to increase its customer base from 1lakh to 1 million and provide accessibility of credit to a billion Indians through its asset-based offerings.
Gold loan space is dominated by NBFCs like Muthoot Finance and Manappuram Finance. After emerging of fintech players like Paytm, PhonePe, Google Pay and others, fintech is slowly but steadily growing in India.
“India is known to have the world’s largest private gold holdings followed by China and the US. The underlying market demand coupled with Rupeek’s large scale disruption has given rise to the accelerated growth of the company’s loan and disbursals” – Chunsoo Kim – Executive managing director at KB investment.
Ending Note:
During the times when start-ups are laying off their employees to cut down their costing and expenses, there are starts ups like Rupeek that have a focused vision and commit that they have been able to observe a serious loophole in the economy.
Till now, Rupeek has raised $60 million and this year will definitely be the gamechanger year for the fintech startup. From 10 to 100 cities, from 1 lakh customer base to 1 million customer base, it will be an interesting watch.
On behalf of Next Big Brand, we wish all the very best to Rupeek for its journey in the coming years.
