NAKAD, a supply chain fintech for Indian MSMEs, has raised $7 million (around Rs 54 crore) in a seed funding round, co-led by Matrix Partners India and Accel.
Early-stage venture capital fund, AdvantEdge Founders also participated in this round. The company will deploy the funds to increase hiring and scale operations within India.
Other prominent angel investors that contributed in this round include Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar (founders, Razorpay), Amrit Acharya and Rahul Sharma (founders, Zetwerk), Sachin Agrawal, Aniket Deb and Ankit Tomar (founders, Bizongo), Nitin Gupta (CEO, Uni Cards) and Raghunandan G (CEO, Zolve), among others.
Launched in January 2022 by Ujwal Kalra, Sambhav Jain and Avinash Uttav, NAKAD aims to solve the massive problem of working capital of Indian MSMEs in the supply chain.
"Hailing from a family of chartered accountants and industrialists, I implicitly understood the massive credit crunch of MSMEs resulting in 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," said Kalra, one of the co-founders.
The company has introduced MicroBill, a proprietary technology, to help credit-starved MSMEs get invoice discounting services previously unavailable to them from formal channels.
NAKAD’s founders are alumni of IIM Ahmedabad, IIT Bombay and IIT Guwahati and have worked respectively with Boston Consulting Group, HUL, Oracle, and Samsung.
The startup claims that MicroBill will unlock $30 billion worth of capital for credit-starved MSMEs.
The company has partnered with multiple anchors, their supplier base, banks and NBFCs to enable a seamless solution, designed to benefit the entire ecosystem.
"The founders have a unique approach to penetrating large industrial ecosystems with software and then driving formal payments and credit penetration among MSMEs in that ecosystem," said Vikram Vaidyanathan, managing director, Matrix India.
Another invoice discounting platform KredX, operated by Minions Ventures Pvt. Ltd, had raised $26 million in its Series B funding round led by US-based Tiger Global Management in 2019.
