Cashflo gets Rs 29 crore funding led by SAIF Partners

Mumbai-based invoice discounting company Cashflo has raised $3.3 million (Rs 29 crore) in a SAIF Partners-led series A funding round to fuel its expansion plan.

The financing round also saw participation from a clutch of angel investors, including Ashish Iyer, who was previously a senior partner at BCG, and Arpan Sheth, partner at Bain and Co.

Cashflo, founded in 2017 by former BCG executives Ankur Bhageria and Dushyant Agarwal, works with more than 10 lenders, including ICICI Bank, IDFC First Bank and Yes Bank, offering a marketplace through which companies can seek funding for their invoices. It mostly serves the funding requirements of the vendor ecosystem of large firms.

“We will use the funding to expand the team, strengthen the platform and expand our scope of operations,” said Bhageria, cofounder, Cashflo. “We are currently catering to the vendors in 30 cities whose corporate customers are in the seven main metros only.”

The platform has on board companies engaged in manufacturing, textiles, pharmaceuticals, travel, retail and logistics. Working with anchor corporate entities like Tata Group, Vedanta group, Aditya Birla group and others, Cashflo serves the funding needs of both their vendors as well as their deals and distributors.

“We allow big corporate treasury departments to deploy their excess capital to fund their vendor ecosystem as well through our platform, which helps them earn better rates of interest. We also allow them to mix the funding with loans from other lenders,” said Bhageria.

Cashflo is working in a sector which has other players, many of whom are licensed by the Reserve Bank of India to operate as a TReDS (trade receivables and discounting system) platform. Bhageria said he intentionally kept away from applying for the licence since he intended to cater to the funding requirements of MSMEs and large corporates.