Cashflo, a supply chain finance startup, has raised $3.3 million (Rs 23.8 crore) in its Series A round of funding from multi-stage investment firm SAIF Partners, the company said in a statement on Wednesday.
The company will use the funds to expand its product and ramp up its team, it added.
Angel investors including Ashish Iyer, previously senior partner at Boston Consulting Group, and Arpan Sheth, partner at Bain & Co, also participated in the funding round.
Cashflo, which is operated by Valor Innovations Pvt. Ltd, was founded in 2017 by Ankur Bhageria and Dushyant Agarwal. It seeks to create a win-win situation for buyers, suppliers and financiers through its platform that offers a stock-exchange like dynamic pricing model.
The company helps sellers undertake invoice discounting and get early payments to manage their working capital needs while it enables buyers to enhance their EBITDA margins or optimize their working capital by extending payables days. To facilitate this, Cashflo has partnered with corporates such as Tata Group, Aditya Birla Group and Bajaj Group.
Ankur Bhageria, co-founder and CEO at Cashflo said that the company is creating India’s largest digital marketplace for invoice discounting to solve the day-to-day cash flow problems faced by small businesses with a mission to unlock over $100 billion of trapped working capital in the economy.
Both co-founders Bhageria and Agarwal had earlier worked with Boston Consulting Group. Bhageria in an alumnus of Sardar Patel College of Engineering and Indian School of Business. Agarwal is an alumnus of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi and Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Calcutta.
The investment firm has been active in India for over a decade and prides itself for having taken a bunch of private firms, including MakeMyTrip Ltd and Just Dial Ltd, to the public market.
SAIF Partners raised $350 million (Rs 2,247 crore) for a new fund in July 2017. It is the firm’s third India-focussed vehicle and its size is almost the same as its previous two India funds.
The firm chases investments in sectors such as consumer products and services, technology, media, education, telecom, financial services, healthcare, travel and tourism, and manufacturing. It typically invests between $2 million and $75 million in one or more rounds in its portfolio companies. It has also built an active public equities portfolio.
In the digital lending segment, SAIF Partners led an investment in ZipLoan earlier this year.