India-based employee financial health app Avail Finance has reportedly raised $9m in its Series A round.
Matrix Partners India, an early-stage investment firm, led the series, according to a number of reports in the media. Last year, Matrix Partners led a $17.2m investment into the FinTech, joined by other backers including Ola co-founders Bhavish Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati, Flipkart co-founder and group CEO Binny Bansal, and Freecharge founder Kunal Shah.
With the newly raised funds, Avail is looking to expand its product suites and offer micro-savings and micro-insurance products tailored to employees, the articles report.
Founded in 2017, Avail Finance offers an app to employees to help them apply for loans quickly and from anywhere. A user simply follows a handful of steps on the mobile app and will be able to take out a personal loan with flexible repayment plans. A user is able to take out a loan of up to 200 per cent of their salary.
Last year, Matrix Partners pulled in $300m for its third investment fund which would be used to back FinTechs, consumer technology, B2B and enterprise companies in through their seed and Series B stages.
The firm previously invested into the $29m Series C round of OfBusiness, a SME financing platform.
Investment into India’s FinTech sector witnessed a huge fall during 2018 compared with 2017 and results from Q1 2019 look set to continue the downward trend, data from FinTech Global shows. In 2017, a colossal $5.7bn was invested into Indian FinTechs, while last year there was only $1.8bn deployed. The drop-off is largely down to a $3.1bn investment into Flipkart in 2017.
