Rural-fintech company Navadhan has successfully completed its Series A equity funding round, exceeding its initial goal of 80 crore, ultimately securing 111 crore. The round, primarily led by NabVentures, the investment branch of NABARD, also saw Prime Ventures as the co-lead, with additional participation from LNB Group, which invests in tech startups through VC funds and AIFs. Several returning investors—Varanium NexGen Fintech Fund, Gemba Capital, Faad, VC-Grid, and Anicut—also increased their investments.
Over the past three years, Navadhan has successfully completed four funding rounds. The newly raised 111 crore from the Series A funding will be utilized to accelerate business expansion and improve the company’s AceN tech platform. Currently, it boasts over 700 crore in debt lines from more than 25 banks and NBFCs that are connected via its AceN platform, enabling API integrations.
Co-founded by Nitin Agrawal and three partners—Amit Biswal, Vijay Haswani, and Anirudh Ramakuru—who collectively bring 15-25 years of experience in the financial services sector, Navadhan has created the AceN tech platform to provide working capital financing for rural small enterprises (MSMEs). The government places significant emphasis on MSMEs as they play a crucial role in promoting employment opportunities in rural and semi-urban regions.
Speaking on the fundraise, Nitin Agrawal, Founder of Navadhan said, “We are happy to find investors who share our mission of creating new-wealth (Nava-dhan) for the rural-preneurs. At an early stage, Tech investors helped us in building the AceN tech platform. We are very excited now to have NabVentures since rural-MSMEs is our core customer segment. Also, happy to have support from LNB family office with a vantage of running seasoned businesses in India.”
Ashish Choudhary, CIO of NabVentures said, “Navadhan has demonstrated a calibrated growth of 12x in the last 3 years while maintaining good asset quality. Building the AceN Tech platform alongside has helped them do Co-lending seamlessly to break the barriers in leveraging capital far more efficiently compared to traditional NBFCs.”
“We’re pleased to continue to back Nitin and the Navadhan team to serve rural small businesses at scale. Navadhan’s AceN tech platform is one of the more advanced tech platforms that builds on top of IndiaStack to provide differentiated underwriting capabilities and this has played out in the performance metrics of Navadhan”, said Sanjay Swamy, Managing Partner, Priven Advisors, Advisory to Prime Venture Partners
Aparajit Bhandarkar of Varanium NexGen said, “With the power of data science, Navadhan's proprietary alternative underwriting model assesses the digital footprint and cash flow surrogates. This solves the lack of income proofs and limited banking track record in the predominantly cash-based economy to enable credible lending to nano entrepreneurs across rural and semi-urban markets.”
Amit Mehta of LNB Group said, “We believe that Navadhan has the right founder-market fit to build a business towards an IPO. We like the focus on building the capital efficient lending network, especially in the priority sector lending space. We are coming into the company at a crucial stage when the business is poised for sustainable growth for many years to come.”
