Delhi, India-based fintech supply chain platform Nakad raised USD 7 million in its seed funding. The round took place on May 25, 2022. Accel and Matrix Partners India co-led the financing for Nakad.
The round also saw participation from AdvantEdge Founders. Several other prominent startup founders, such as Razorpay’s Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar; Zetwerk’s Amrit Acharya and Rahul Sharma; Uni Cards founder Nitin Gupta; and Zolve’s Raghunandan G, participated in the funding.
Purpose of Funding by Nakad
With the latest investment, the company would scale its presence to various markets. It will also increase its employee headcount across multiple operations such as technology, product, customer success and business development.
The supply chain fintech platform also plans to expand its customer base. It plans expansion in pharmaceuticals, chemicals, auto construction, capital goods and consumer durables in the coming months.
What the founder has to say
“Multiple industries have deep-tier supply chain networks. Today’s supply chain financing companies mostly tackle the anchor supplier to the corporations, which now have enough options to cover their working capital needs. Nakad works on deep-tier supply chain finance. It caters to the supplier of suppliers where the real issue of SME financing lies”, said Ujwal Kalra, co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Nakad.
“Hailing from a family of chartered accountants and industrialists, I implicitly understood the massive credit crunch of MSMEs resulting in an inability to grow their business and pay their employees on time. This issue is not just confined to MSMEs but also rolls back to their large customers, impacting the entire supply chain,” he further added.
What the investors have to say
“Our thesis is that all supply chains in India are getting digitized with B2B payments and transaction finance crucial to digital adoption and stickiness. Nakad is addressing a big opportunity in deep-tier supply chain financing. The founders have a unique approach to penetrating large industrial ecosystems with software and then driving formal payments and credit penetration among SMEs”, said Vikram Vaidyanathan, managing director, Matrix India.
“Credit for MSMEs is a misnomer. B2B supply chain credit today is limited to large enterprises. This is because financial institutions find it extremely hard to access verified information of transactions between original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), tier-1, tier-2 and tier-3 suppliers. We are quite excited to partner with the Nakad team, which has built an amazing technology solution to this problem,” said Prayank Swaroop, partner at Accel.
About Nakad
Nakad means cash in Hindi. Ujwal Kalra, Sambhav Jain and Avinash Uttav brought Nakad into existence in January 2022. The startup aims to solve the massive problem of working capital of Indian MSMEs in the supply chain.
The founders of Nakad are former graduates of IIM Ahmedabad, IIT Bombay and IIT Guwahati. The company introduced its proprietary solution called MicroBill. Its architecture tokenizes invoices that flow across the entire supply chain. Moreover, the startup has also partnered with a few banks and non-bank financial companies.
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