Cashinvoice raises $1-mn funding from Accion Venture Lab

Mumbai: Cashinvoice, a supply chain financing (SCF) platform, announced on Tuesday that it has raised Pre-Series-A funding of $1 million from Accion Venture Lab. Cashinvoice provides customised SCF solutions to the buyers and suppliers of mid and large corporates through its digital marketplace for invoice discounting.

The platform integrates with corporates to access and validate invoices, dynamically price discounts on the invoices based on its risk assessment algorithms and enables lenders on the platform to digitally process loans against invoices. Since its launch in September 2019, the company has disbursed over 10 lakh invoices amounting to over Rs 4,000 crores and has over 3,500 MSMEs on the platform. The pre-series A funding by Accion Venture Lab comes at a strategic period as the platform gears up to facilitate over Rs 10,000 crores worth of financing for MSMEs in the year ahead.

Arun Poojari, co-founder and CEO, Cashinvoice, said: "We are thrilled to be associated with Accion Venture Lab. Accion is well respected across the globe for its impact investing led practices and objectives. This new funding round will help us develop our key services of early payments to suppliers, purchase order financing, buyer financing and retailer financing. We are glad to be a part of this revolutionary moment where new age FinTechs like ours are redefining the rules of lending by using alternate transactional data to efficiently originate, assess and monitor borrowers, thus bridging the trust deficit between SMEs and lenders."

"Millions of MSMEs across India are struggling to recover from the effects of the pandemic, and they need customised financing options in order to adapt and build resilience," said Michael Schlein, President and CEO of Accion. "By applying innovative new credit-assessment strategies to expand access to financing for MSMEs, Cashinvoice is creating an inclusive financial system and ensuring that microentrepreneurs can continue serving their communities."

Amee Parbhoo, MD, Accion Venture Lab, said: "We see great potential in Cashinvoice, as they are a unified platform for all SCF needs, backed with cutting-edge advanced technology. Unlocking working capital within supply chains is the need of the hour, as it not only helps with effective cash flow management in corporates, but also caters to the large number of underserved micro-enterprises who need formal sources of lending." Cashinvoice's model incentivises buyers by giving them discounts to pay their suppliers early thereby unlocking capital which is trapped in the form of credit period within supply chains. Thus, the model creates a win-win scenario by addressing the working capital needs of MSME suppliers and reducing procurement cost for buyers. The company aims to bridge the $400 billion credit gap within the MSME segment through cost effective and hassle-free access to supply chain financing. Shrinivas Kasar, co-founder and COO, Cashinvoice, said: "Despite India's GDP being majorly dependent on the health of the MSME ecosystem, the current gap in financial inclusivity for micro-organisations. Technology has always been the core at Cashinvoice, where we have developed AI tools to analyse trade ledger data along with alternate data points in order to evaluate a borrower's credit worthiness, even if they lack a formal credit history."