Vikas Garg, Ex-CFO Paytm, Rahul Nagar Asia Pacific Lead Payments, Genpact & Ex-VP Paytm and Himanshu Arora Head of Products Gaana have recently come together to launch a venture to support MSMEs in India through innovative and customisable working capital solutions. The new venture, named Kredmint, aims to support MSMEs by deeply understanding their business models and leverages data to offer them completely flexible and transparent supply chain financing solutions using smart contracts and tokenization. The startup has already made the credit facility available to MSMEs and will launch its app shortly.
Registered under the parent name of Kredmint Technologies Private Limited by Vikas Garg, ex-CFO paytm, the company got incorporated in June 2022 and he is now joined by two senior executives of the fintech industry as co-founders - Rahul Nagar and Himanshu Arora. Rahul is an IIT-Delhi alumnus and has worked in business, strategy and operations roles across large scaled up companies including Paytm, Accenture and Genpact. Himanshu is a BITS Pilani alumnus and has worked in tech and product roles across multiple tech unicorns including Paytm, Gaana, Yatra, Spinny and MapmyIndia.
The venture run by trio has just closed an angel round of 14 crores (US ~$2mn) supported by all leading fintech and digital leaders like Kunal Shah (Founder-CRED), Ashneer Grover (Founder-Bharatpe), Amit Lakhotia (Founder-Parkplus), Shankar Nath (Co-founder-Junio), Amit Sinha (Founder-Unnati), Manish Amin (Co-founder-Yatra), Sachin Seth (CEO-BSE Ebix), Jaskaran Kapany (Ex-CMO, Xiaomi, Paytm), Ankur Warikoo (Founder-Nearbuy), Renu Satti (Ex-COO, Paytm), Ajay Shekhar Sharma (CBO-Paytm), Sudhanshu Gupta (COO-Paytm First Games) and Senu Sam (CEO and Co-founder Mykare) among others. This round has been joined by two India based VCs and one Singapore based VC firm.
“Kredmint offers multiple working capital financing solutions for MSMEs in partnership with non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) at the moment.” Vikas Garg said.
"Over the last decade, we have seen the evolution of the digital payments ecosystem in India,. We could see that all distribution channels expect the MSMEs to fund for inventory putting funding obligations on them. Hence they become constrained to grow their business to the next level. We intend to build large scale tech solutions and solve working capital problems of MSMEs in a model similar to scale up of digital payments in India”. he added.
As per the reports, India has approx. 65-70 million MSMEs, with only 1/3rd of them having access to a formal source of credit. On average, a MSME in India pays approximately 30 to 40 per cent of his income and about more than 50 per cent of his gross margin towards interest.
