Rural-fintech Navadhan raised Series A equity funding round with its initial target of 80 Cr oversubscribed to 111 Cr. NabVentures, the venture Capital arm of NABARD, is the lead. Prime Ventures is the co-lead with the presence of LNB Group, also an LP in VC funds/ AIFs investing in tech startups. Other existing investors also doubled down - Varanium NexGen Fintech Fund, Gemba Capital, Faad, VC-Grid and Anicut.

Over the past 3 years, Navadhan has raised 4 rounds of funding. The fresh 111 Cr Series-A financing will be invested in driving business expansion and boosting the company's AceN tech platform. It already has in place over 700 Cr of debt lines from over 25 Bank/ NBFCs which are onboarded on its AceN platform that facilitates API integrations.

Navadhan is co-founded by Nitin Agrawal with 3 teammates - Amit Biswal, Vijay Haswani and Anirudh Ramakuru, all having 15-25 years of experience in the financial services space. They built AceN tech platform, which enables working capital finance for rural small enterprises (MSMEs). MSMEs is a major focus area of the government to boost employment generation at local level in rural and semi-urban regions.

Commenting on the fundraise, Navadhan Founder Nitin Agrawal said: "We are delighted to identify investors who believe in our vision of generating new-wealth (Nava-dhan) for the rural-preneurs. Tech investors at an early stage supported us in developing the AceN tech platform. We are extremely thrilled now to have NabVentures as rural-MSMEs is our primary customer base. Happy also to have LNB family office support with an advantage of operating veteran businesses in India".

NabVentures is originating from NABARD's ecosystem that is India's premier development bank that is dedicated to fostering sustainable and equitable agriculture and rural development. Ashish Choudhary, CIO, NabVentures has stated: "Navadhan has shown a measured 12x growth in the past 3 years with excellent asset quality. Developing the AceN Tech platform together has enabled them to do Co-lending effortlessly to demolish the silos in utilizing capital much more effectively than conventional NBFCs".

"We're happy to continue to support Nitin and the Navadhan team to reach rural small businesses at scale. Navadhan's AceN tech platform is one of the more sophisticated tech platforms based on IndiaStack that offers differentiated underwriting ability and this has unfolded in Navadhan's performance metrics", said Sanjay Swamy, Managing Partner, Priven Advisors, Advisory to Prime Venture Partners.

Aparajit Bhandarkar of Varanium NexGen stated: "With the capability of data science, Navadhan's in-house alternative underwriting model analyzes the digital footprint and cash flow surrogates. This overcomes the absence of income proofs and thin banking track record in the largely cash-based economy to facilitate credible lending to nano entrepreneurs in rural and semi-urban markets".

Amit Mehta of LNB Group added: "We feel that Navadhan has the correct founder-market fit to scale a business to an IPO. We appreciate the emphasis on capital efficient lending network building, particularly in the priority sector lending business. We are entering the company at an opportune time when the business is ready to scale for many years to come".

Navadhan has both human resources and Tech on the ground with a brick to click model, build for scale where trust and collection efficiencies are paramount for success. This startup team spent the first two years developing the AceN tech platform before beginning lending operations. AceN has end-to-end customer fulfilment workflows with a paperless, seamless customer experience from on-boarding, underwriting, servicing to multi-mode collections.

AceN also possesses proprietary data sciences backed technology tools integrated into its processes. Navadhan's own NBFC license has been instrumental in providing regulatorily compliant processes. Navadhan has expanded its reach in 700 PIN codes in 5 states of MP, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Karnataka and Odisha. It aims to go deeper in geographies and diversify its loan products.