Fintech Startup U Gro Gets Rs 100 Crore Funding From Sachin Bansal, Poonawalla family

Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal and the Poonawalla family will jointly invest Rs 100 crore in technology-enabled small businesses lending platform U Gro Capital.

According to The Economic Times, the transaction will be undertaken through two separate securitisation and bond deals. The securitisation deal has already been done with Poonawalla Finance, which owns India’s largest vaccine maker Serum Institute of India, the report added. U Gro Capital is a BSE-listed firm set up by former Religare Finance chief executive Shachindra Nath.

U Gro Executive Chairman Shachindra Nath told the Economic Times, “These transactions demonstrate our ability to securitise our book at an early stage of our development and establish that besides conventional term–financing, we have the ability to raise resources from alternative channels as well.”

U Gro Capital has a business model where they lend to MSMEs, a model being adopted by a number of startups. The company claims to have disbursed loans to around 1,000 customers, amounting to Rs 600 crore. The projected figure for the current financial year 2019-20 is Rs 1,200 crore based on the performance in the first quarter.