Tag: 9Unicorns

Housing credit fintech Homeville raises $7 million

Banking & Finance

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Homeville, a financial technology company in the housing finance space, has raised $7 million funding with participation from 9Unicorns, Varanium NexGen Fund, JITO Angel Network, CREDAI Members Network, BlackSoil and Earlsfield Capital, among other investors.

Founded by IIM alumni Lalit Menghani, Madhusudan Sharma and Prasad Ajinkya, the startup offers technology-enabled solutions for home buyers.

The technology architecture is based on open banking principles and designs.

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Homeville’s three platforms include HomeCapital for down payment assistance — it has facilitated $250 million worth of housing sales; Bharat Housing Network for co-lending infrastructure in affordable housing finance; and HomeNxt, a business-to-consumer platform, currently in beta stage, which uses technology for mortgage underwriting and delivery.

The company is building the software stack for the digital mortgage platform.

Co-founder Sharma said, “We pioneered India’s first down payment assistance programme to accelerate housing for first-time home buyers. With our digital mortgage product and co-lending platform for affordable home finance, we are deepening our commitment to home buyers and India’s housing finance ecosystem.”

Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, Founder, 9Unicorns and Venture Catalysts, added, “The company is building the missing credit network and fintech rails in the massive Indian housing ecosystem. This will accelerate the housing-for-all mission and create a massive social impact.”

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Jaxay Shah, MD of Savvy group, investor in JITO Angel Network and former national president of CREDAI added, “Homeville’s platforms address the challenges faced by millennial home-buyers and the real estate market. The company aims to help accelerate the $100-billion housing industry, poised to reach approximately $500 billion by 2025. With their disruptive technology and the strong founding team, Homeville aims to broaden the entire housing finance market.”

“Housing is a priority for government and regulators across the world. The long-term and safe nature of housing finance assets create a large opportunity for new-age technology companies for building interesting fintech models. Homeville is uniquely positioned to be a market leader in the technology business driving home finance digitally,” Aparajit Bhandarkar, Partner, Varanium Capital, added.

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Y Combinator-backed inai raises $4 million in seed round

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Fintech SaaS startup inai has raised around $4 million in a seed round led by Berlin-based Paua Ventures and 9Unicorns.

Uncommon Capital, Soma Capital, Anarko ventures, Better Capital, and Gemba Capital along with angel investors — Sriram Krishnan, Lenny Rachitsky, Matt Robinson (Founder GoCardless, Nested), Louis Beryl (Rocketplace, Earnest) , Charlie Delingpole (Founder Comply Advantage), Naren Shaam (Founder Omio) and Kunal Shah (Founder CRED) — also participated in the round.

Founded by serial entrepreneurs Anantharaman Pattabiraman and Karthik Narayanan in May this year, inai is in the payments segment: inai is a no/low code platform that connects with multiple payment methods and payment gateways or processors in one simple integration. It allows merchants to manage checkout, payments, subscriptions, refunds, cancellations, chargebacks across the globe along with the ability to orchestrate any business logic such as localising the checkout by region, routing transactions intelligently or having failover logic to recover more transactions without needing any further developer involvement. Merchants can also connect with BI tools, fraud providers, invoicing and tax tools.

Strengthen tech team

inai will utilize the fresh capital to strengthen its technology team, expand its product portfolio, and build out their sales and marketing. The start-up is part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 cohort for start-ups.

Anantharaman Pattabiraman and Karthik Narayanan, Founders, inai, said, “While running our previous DTC business, we realised that with e-commerce going increasingly cross-border, optimising the checkout experience for the customer in each market is extremely important. inai allows merchants to go live within 60 minutes with an international payment stack that is optimised for every market they want to operate in and take control of their payment data. In addition, inai provides a rich software layer to support different subscription models for an e-commerce merchant or a SaaS business to sell across multiple geographies and localise the checkout experience.”

Also see: Tummoc raises $540,000 in seed funding round from angel investors

Federico Wengi , Partner at Paua Ventures said, “As the online payments tech-stack gets more sophisticated with new local payment methods, BNPL solutions (buy now pay later) and e-wallets, companies look for solutions to simplify and coordinate online payments. Inai taps into this large opportunity by offering a no-code software solution to simplify online payments once and for all.”

Dr Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, Co-founder & Managing Director, 9Unicorns, said, “The key differentiating factor of this platform is that it enables merchants to set up their payment stack with a single integration. Merchants are not required to write any code, which makes it easier for start-ups and e-commerce businesses to ramp up their operations without any technical expertise. In an increasingly digital economy like Asia, where e-commerce and cross border e-commerce is on an upward growth trajectory, inai is well-poised to capitalize on the cross border payments market.”

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Social commerce platform Coutloot raises $8 million from Ameba Capital, 9Unicorns and others

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Coutloot, an offline-to-online (O2O) social commerce platform, raised $8 million in a pre-series round led by venture capital firm Ameba Capital.

Other investors such as SOSV, 9Unicorns, Astarc Ventures also participated in the round, including existing investor Venture Catalysts.

The new funding is a precursor to a bigger $25 million round to be closed soon, the company said.

Fund deployment

Coutloot plans to use the funds for launching more services for retailers such as working capital solutions, video-stories commerce features, scaling its B2B supply chain, and stepping-up hiring activities across verticals, including tech, marketing and leadership roles.

Founded by Jasmeet Thind and Mahima Kaul, the company is aiming to build an online buying and selling platform in India, replicating the success of platforms such as Alibaba Group’s Taobao.

It is a platform that allows buyers and sellers to bargain while shopping. It helps sellers list non-MRP (non-fixed-price), unbranded local market products across fashion, electronics, home decor, sports and other boxed categories that account for 75 per cent of India’s retail sector at present.

Its app also allows buyers to chat in their preferred language, which gets translated into the seller’s preferred language.

Jasmeet Thind, Co-founder and CEO at Coutloot, said, “We are here to humanise e-commerce in India that is still just 10 per cent of the total retail and FMCG sector. Most commerce still happens offline for various reasons, including low trust and bargain.”

“Coutloot helps sellers and buyers with that power to decide the prices after a bargain on the chat. We are trying to create Coutloot as India’s Taobao, which is one of fascinating e-commerce success stories around the world,” Thind said.

The company has grown 11 times during the pandemic and has been growing at a CAGR of 300 per cent over the last three years. Coutloot is looking to clock a platform GMV of ₹1,000 crore in 2022 on the back of rising demand coming from smaller towns.

The company’s best-performing sellers come from smaller towns like Nagaon in Assam, Basai near Gurugram, Korba in Chhattisgarh, Surat in Gujarat, and Ludhiana in Punjab. The platform has a quarterly seller retention rate of 42 percent.

Top sellers on Coutloot are making upto ₹8 lakh a month while an average seller makes around ₹14,650.

It provides business opportunities to over 5,00,000 offline retailers, mom-and-pop stores, home sellers, and street hawkers, the company said. It has over 20 million listings on its app, which has been downloaded over 7.2 million times.

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