Bengaluru start up SlicePay raises $2 million in funding

BENGALURU: Caling up operations in a bid to reach out to more number of students, Bengaluru-based fintech startup SlicePay has raised $2 million as part of it series-A round of funding. An online lending platform for college students, Slicepay enables students to buy e-commerce services. The startup which was set up in 2016, has a reach of over 10,000 students.

While Slicepay’s existing investor Blume Ventures also participated in the round of funding, new investors too have invested in the startup including Japanese organisation Das Capital and Russian-based Simile Ventures.

What does Slicepay do? The startup gives credit to college students to buy gadgets online or shop on specific websites for any of their needs, through a vetting process. The startup reaches out to students on campuses, and after thorough verification, it lends money to students with an easy instalment repaying model.

Since the startup does not insist on a minimum amount for credit, students have the advantage of making us of the platform for recharging their cell phones or for even buying movie tickets. Some of them make use of it for bigger shopping such as buying laptops or phones.

While earlier this year Slicepay expanded itse services to Chennai, the newly raised funds would help them expand to other parts of the country as well, co-founder Rajan Bajaj said. “This capital would now allow us to serve students in other parts of India for both their education and consumption related credit needs. We have developed a strong data driven risk model using alternative data points and in the next phase of growth, we will be expanding to other cities and identifying the right set of customers to give access to SlicePay.”

Since its inception and until now, the startup has disbursed more than `45 crore in loans, and is dealing with an average of 30,000 orders every month. “In the last 1 year we have scaled our operations across Chennai, Bangalore and Vellore having seen tremendous response from college students and collaboration cooperation from various top tier institutes. For instance, recently we signed and MoU with IIT Madras to provide credit facilities to students in the form of credit for education and consumer goods & services and we look to extend the same opportunity to other institutes.” added Deepak Malhotra, co-founder of SlicePay. While Bajaj is an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur, Malhotra is a graduate from BITS Pilani.