Angels invest in PaisaDukan in third seed round; Crofarm secures bridge capital

Mumbai-based fintech firm BigWin Infotech Pvt. Ltd, which owns peer-to-peer lending marketplace PaisaDukan.com, has raised $235,000 (Rs 1.6 crore) in its third seed funding round from an undisclosed angel investor, a company statement said.

The company had already raised a total of $875,000 in two angel rounds last year. With this round, the startup has raised a total of $1.11 million till date.

The company will use the capital to hire talent so that it can expand its technology workforce, co-founder Rajiv M Ranjan said in the statement.

Founded in November 2017 by Ranjan, PaisaDukan is a P2P lending marketplace platform where borrowers can take loans from investors (lenders) who are willing to lend their own money for an agreed upon interest rate. It also provides legal and recovery support, principal protection, and evaluation of credit risk by a proprietary algorithm.

“This is the first round of funding after we received the NBFC-P2P Certificate of Registration (CoR) from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in July 2018. In the last five months of operations, we have been able to manage at 0% NPA on our platform,” Ranjan said.

He added that the company is in discussion with venture capital funds to raise its next round of investment.

Agri-tech startup Crofarm raises bridge round

Agri-tech startup Crofarm, which connects farmers with retailers, has raised $500,000 (Rs 3.5 crore) from a group of high net-worth individuals including Vinay Mittal, former chief of strategy at HT Media and Ramit Sethi, founder and chief executive of startup accelerator Strongbox Ventures, online media publication Entrackr reported.

Its existing investors including Factor[e] Ventures, Pravega Ventures and Ashish Chand of Yukti Securities also put in money in this round.

Through its app, Crofarm Agiproducts Pvt. Ltd sells fruits and vegetables directly sourced from farmers. The app also tracks retail-ordering behaviour and predicts demand using machine-learning, guiding customers on the right order size.

The company was founded in May 2016 by former Grofers executives Varun Khurana and Prashant Jain. Prior to starting up, Khurana was chief technical officer at the daily essentials delivery app while Jain was vice president of operations.

The company had raised Rs 5 crore in a pre-Series A round led by US-based venture development firm Factor[e] Ventures in August 2017. Google India managing director Rajan Anandan and PayU India managing director Jitendra Gupta also invested in the round. The investment was made via online deal-making platform LetsVenture.

According to VCCEdge, the data research platform of News Corp VCCircle, Crofarm had raised $1.5 million in a seed round from Pravega Ventures and other investors in July 2016.