Narayana Murthy's Catamaran Ventures Backs Innoviti in Latest Funding Round

Innoviti Payment Solutions announced that it has raised financing of Rs. 30 crores from Infosys co-founder N.R. Narayana Murthy's Catamaran Ventures, and New India Investment Corporation, Canada.

"We will use the latest fund to expand our business of real-time distribution of credit to small and medium enterprises (SMEs), whose capital requirement is still unmet," the startup said in a statement. The funding will be additionally used for marketing, product development and for scaling up its overall payments infrastructure.

"Our unique ability to extend loans for SMEs in real-time at their points of purchase solves a real-world SME lending problem." said Mr. Rajeev Agrawal, CEO, Innoviti.

Innoviti had previously raised Rs. 10 crores through debt and equity from domestic and overseas angel investors, including watch maker Titan company in January 2014. The seven-year-old payments solutions platform lets merchants accept payments from online, mobile, and offline sources, and enables lenders to distribute credits through offline merchant points at flexible tenures and lowered interest rates.

Their announcement claims that the firm has transacted over Rs. 400-crore of loans to over 10,000 SMEs in 20 cities across the country through multiple vendors annually. Innoviti's clients include HDFC, ICICI, Axis, SBI, Standard Chartered, Kotak, Citibank and NBFCs such as Bajaj Finance.

The alternative lending landscape has seen plenty of startup activity in recent times, the highest funded startups in the SME category include Capital Float, which raised a $13 million Series A in February led by Sequoia Capital and SAIF Partners this year. Other significant players include Ahmedabad-based Lending Kart, which raised a $10 million Series A earlier this month, and NeoGrowth, which raised $1.6 million in venture funding in 2014.

Written with inputs from IANS