School fee financing startup FinancePeer raises angel round

Mumbai-based FinancePeer, an artificial intelligence (AI)-based school fee financing company, has raised $706,000 in an angel funding round from early-stage venture capital firm PitchRight Ventures and individual investors.

Angel investor Manish Shah and Ravi Sanghvi of MarkV, an early-stage investment company, also participated in the round, said Rohit Gajbhiye, founder, FinancePeer.

“With the fresh funds, we will scale up B2B (business-to-business) partnership with schools, hire a larger sales team to target 550 schools before March 2020 with a disbursal of Rs 200 crore,” added Gajbhiye.

The round was raised at a valuation of more than three times the previous valuation in February this year, said Gajbhiye.

Founded in 2016 by Gajbhiye, an alumnus of Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay,  Gajbhiye previously worked with Development Bank of Singapore (DBS).

The company partners with schools across the country and help parents pay fees in instalments at zero interest. It has tie-ups with more than 250 schools and has processed over 5,000 school fee loans on its platform. It is present in around 27 cities across the country.

In a similar deal that happened in December last year, Gray Matters Capital invested in GyanDhan, an education financing marketplace which has developed a proprietary model to assess the employability prospects of students for non-banking financial companies and banks to make education loan decisions.