“We are privileged to have closed Series D funding within a year of the last equity round. The funds will help us continue the strong growth in lending to micro enterprises. Our enhanced focus on machine learning has benefited from the mentorship of Google Launchpad programme and this has enhanced our ability to create a transformative change for the excluded micro enterprises,” said Sanjay Sharma, Managing Director, Aye Finance.
Aye Finance is a MSME lender and it raised Rs 233.62 crore in a Series D equity round led by Falcon Edge Capital, a New York based investment firm.
Within a year of raising money from CapitalG, Aye Finance raises Rs 233.6 Cr in Series D.
Other existing investors in Aye Finance like CapitalG, LGT and MAJ invest also participated in this Series D fund raise round.
Aye Finance was founded by Sanjay Sharma and Vikram Jetley in 2014. It has around 104 branches in 11 states and has served more than 1,00,000 micro enterprises. They have a loan book of over Rs 1,000 crore.
“The funds raised will be utilized to drive business growth and develop its technology and data mining capabilities”, said the company.
“We focused on MSME and SME lending as a significant yet under-served financing opportunity with healthy unit economics and a large, fragmented addressable market. We are pleased to partner with Aye Finance on this next leg of growth as they bring credit to India’s under-served MSMEs via a thoughtful and risk adjusted cluster-based approach.” said Navroz D. Udwadia, Co-Founder of Falcon Edge.
“Since our investment eight months ago, Aye has almost doubled its book and proven its ability to scale branches profitably. We are excited to continue to support the company to help them achieve their goal of extending credit to microenterprises.” said Kaushik Anand, Head of India Investments at Capital.