Indian fintech startup Bold Finance raises $1.5 million seed round led by Kae Capital

Fintech startup Bold Finance said Thursday it has raised a $1.5 million seed round led by Kae Capital.

The round also saw participation from existing investor Antler India and several angel investors such as Nitin Gupta (Uni Cards), Ishpreet Gandhi (Stride Ventures), Shashikant Dola (McKinsey & Company), Tushar Mehndiratta (Avail Finance), Vadiraj Kulkarni (Managing Director). Officer, ITC PSPD) and some others, Kae Capital said in a statement.

Based out of Mumbai, Bold Finance is founded by two 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-2 and Tier-3 cities. The first offer is gold loans.

The firm 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 in a sustainable manner. 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 further 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 span of seven months.

“Gold loans are mostly an emergency or working capital loan, where customers need it quickly. In such a situation, easy access in hyperlocal neighborhoods, longer operating hours and low interest rates are crucial for customers,

“Bold Finance is smartly positioned to cater to such customers and deliver safe, fast and reliable loans in the market,” said Nikhil Jain, Co-Founder of Bold Finance.

Durgesh Suthar, Co-Founder, Bold Finance further 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. ”

Sunitha Viswanathan, Partner, Kae Capital said, “The gold lending industry is a large $65 billion market that continues to be disorganized and fragmented. The customer is looking for a superior experience while borrowing.”

“We believe that Bold’s approach to partnering with the jewelers breaks the trust barrier with the consumer and enables them to deepen the relationship. We are excited to partner with Bold as they build a customer-centric fintech platform for Bharat,” he added.

Nitin Sharma, Co-Founder and General Partner, Antler India said “We are thrilled to have partnered with Nikhil and Durgesh since Bold Finance was just an idea and we are now doubling down after seeing their relentless execution and promising early traction.”

“The team’s unique approach of leveraging the existing infrastructure of local jewelers will build a reliable entity that is set to scale faster and deeper into the massively unorganized gold market,” he added.

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