Teachers’ Venture Growth, the late-stage venture and growth equity investment arm of Canadian firm Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, has co-led a Series E investment round in Indian supply-chain financing platform Mintifi.
The total size of the Series E round, which included both primary capital and secondary transactions, was $180 million (Rs 1,527 crore), the Indian fintech startup said in a statement Tuesday.
The Netherlands-headquartered Prosus co-led the round. Existing investor PremjiInvest chipped in, too.
Darius Vakil, director at TVG India, and Apoorve Goyal, managing director at Prosus India, will join the board of Mintifi.
Mintifi said it will use the fresh capital to expand its offerings, including dealer management systems, loans against property, and domestic and overseas factoring.
“This round of financing will further help us in building cutting-edge tech solutions to deliver even more seamless, efficient solutions for our customers across business-to-business payments, financing and inventory management,” said co-founder and CEO Anup Agarwal.
The announcement comes days after Prosus said last week that it had acquired a 10.65% stake in the Mumbai-based fintech company in October for $79.9 million.
The fintech startup did not share any details of the new round. However, Agarwal said the transaction provided an exit to its early backers with about 11x returns. It also provided an opportunity to its employees to liquidate their stock options, he said, without disclosing the name of the investors who exited.
Mintifi’s earliest backer was Lok Capital, according to VCCEdge, the data research platform of VCCircle. The VC firm first invested in the company in 2017 and then topped up its bets in the following years. Lok Capital’s website shows it has exited Mintifi, but doesn’t say when.
Mintifi had bagged $110 million in a Series D round led by PremjiInvest in March last year. Existing investors Norwest Venture Partners, Elevation Capital and International Finance Corporation (IFC) had also invested at the time. In 2022, the startup raised $40 million in a Series C round from IFC and Norwest. IFC also backed the firm in 2019.
Founded in 2017 by Agarwal, Ankit Mehta and Sanjoy Shome, Mintifi provides full stack end-to-end fulfilment across the supply chain for brands in India. These offerings include payments, invoicing and purchase financing solutions to distributors and retailers in the supply-chain space.
The company works with over 3,000 brands such as Asian Paints, Varun Beverages, Parle Products, Honda, Shree Cement, TVS and Castro.
VCCircle earlier reported that Mintifi recorded a surge in its profit for the year through March 2024 as it expanded its loan book, improved its net interest margin and kept asset quality under control. It posted a consolidated net profit before employee stock ownership costs of Rs 97.8 crore for 2023-24, up from Rs 24.8 crore in the previous fiscal year.
