Fintech startup Bold Finance raises $1.5 million in seed funding

Based out of Mumbai, Bold Finance is founded by IIT Roorkee alumni, Nikhil Jain and Durgesh Suthar, who have collective work experience in stellar organizations like ITC, McKinsey and Flipkart, xto10x respectively. Bold Finance was started with a broad vision to enable financial freedom for Bharat, by improving credit availability for users from the low and middle income segments in tier-two and tier-three cities. Bold Finance’s first offer is gold loans.

Nikhil Jain, Co-Founder, Bold Finance, said, “Gold loans are mostly an emergency or working capital loan, where customers need it fast. In such a situation, easy access in hyper-local neighbourhoods, longer operating hours and low interest rates are essential for customers. Bold Finance is smartly positioned to accommodate such customers and deliver safe, fast and reliable loans in the market.”

Currently, 65% of the $130 billion gold loan market is unorganized and managed by pawnbrokers, moneylenders, jewelers, HNIs, etc. In the unorganized market, customers have a poor user experience due to high interest rates (>30%), no documentation and lack of on openness. Bold Finance is building a technology platform and operations team that enables jewelers to partner with multiple banks to dispense loans in a regulated manner and grow their business sustainably. These jewelers operate as Bold Finance branches. The benefits for customers are low interest rates, easy access to capital, transparency and convenient repayments via mobile app. The operating costs of Bold Finance branches are significantly lower compared to their peers, thereby passing these benefits on to end customers in the form of lower interest rates.

For Bold Finance, the costs and time required to start a new branch are 60 times lower than competitors. Their unique business model of positioning themselves between banks, jewelers and customers allows them to achieve deeper penetration and wider geographical reach in tier 2 and tier 3 cities. This has enabled the company to aggressively open 50+ branches in Mumbai’s suburbs within a short period of 7 months.

Durgesh Suthar, Co-Founder, Bold Finance, added, “We are building a distributed financial technology platform that allows us to scale to multiple branches while having robust mechanisms to mitigate risk across stakeholders such as partner branches, customers, logistics, etc. analyzing multiple data points. ”