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The fintech start-up company CRED which started in 2018, raised $80 million (Rs. 617 crores) in its latest funding round taking the company's valuation to $6.4 billion. CRED said it is raising $140 million in a mix of primary and secondary funding led by Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC.
The existing investors who exited in this ongoing round are Sofina, Tiger Global Management, and Falcon Edge.
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The round comes at a time when the Indian start-up funding environment is moving to a rather conservative and cautionary phase resulting from global macro events including rising inflation, Ukraine War, and public market turmoil.
Several heavy-funded start-ups including Unacademy, Meesho, Vedantu, MFine, and Cars24 have resorted to layoffs to cut costs and extend their runways as far as possible to tide over this downturn.
According to sources, Cred is looking to expand its financial services offering and will also look at inorganic opportunities to get into newer areas of growth.
In December, it acquired Happay to enter the expense management segment. It also acquired Chennai-based liquor delivery startup HipBar for its prepaid payment instrument license.
The company was in the final stages of discussions to acquire investment platform Small case in a share-swap deal.
As part of its regulatory filings earlier in March this year, Cred also stated that it was in process of applying for an account aggregator (AA) license through Dreamplug AA Tech Solutions, the entity is incorporated in January 2020.
An account aggregator (AA) is a type of RBI-regulated entity that helps an individual securely and digitally access and share information from one financial institution(they have an account with), to any other regulated financial institution in the AA network.
Launched in 2018, CRED rewards credit-worthy individuals for their timely credit card bill payments with exclusive offers and access to brands. The company has since expanded its offerings to lending services in partnerships with IDFC bank and various NBFCs.
-by Gautam
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