Cred is a credit bill payment startup by the co-founder of FreeCharge, Kunal Shah. Founded in Cred is Shah’s second venture. Cred incentivizes credit card transactions with the reward points. The company is in plans to raise $100 million (INR 692 crore) million dollars in its next round. The investors include The China-based venture capital firm Hillhouse Capital. It also consists of its current investors such as Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital, Apoletto Asia among others.
Cred is looking forward to boosting up its valuation to $400 million (INR 28,000 crore) with the new investment, almost fivefold times of the previous value $75 million (IRN 520 crore). According to reports, Cred is assessing the term sheets and the due diligence procedure is in progress. Hillhouse will mostly select a small stake with Sequoia by leading in the round. Sequoia holds up to 15% of stakes of Cred.
Cred is only accessible by its application users, which provides exclusive rewards for making timely credit card bill payment. Eligible users with good scores can operate this application to understand and steer credit card statement and information, specifically with consideration to hidden charges, and are provided rewards suitably. Creed has partnered up with brands like Airbnb, Cure. fit, Urban Ladder, FreshMenu, BookMyShow, Ixigo and several other brands for monthly rewards. Cred is associated with banks such as ICICI, HDFC, Kotak, Axis, and others.
Cred also working on Unified Payments Interface (UPI) payments for users to fulfill credit card bills. The company’s strategy on building its customer base through credit card bill payments and rewards and then evolve high-end allegiance and provide other services such as insurances.
Payments under UPI has been recorded around 800 million in the month of March 2019. Google and the Boston Consulting group is expecting that the e-payments sector of India is estimated to reach $500 Billion by 2020, assisting 15% to our national GDP.
Shah has also introduced other ventures such as PaisaBack, which was shut down to launch Freecharge. Later Freecharge was sold to Snapdeal in 2015, in a $450 million (INR 3.1 thousand crore) deal. The application was again sold to Axis Bank.
Hillhouse is one of Asia’s biggest investment companies and it has raised $10.6 billion in 2018 for its recent investment. The company has backed up Indian companies such as Swiggy, CarDekho, Hector Beverages, and others.
Cred’s deal would be among the quickest valuation scale-ups for an Indian startup. The company aims India’s small profitable credit card using audience, dominated by a few banks. Shah is also aiming at the top layers of Indian consumers. The strategy is to connect to eligible businesses through aimed marketing offers. Cred has links ups with big merchants who run particularise provides on the application to generate the consumers with a credit card.
“In the long journey, Cred may enter the broader credit card market which is under-penetrated. With excellent quality data that the firm is generating, they will be in a stance to disrupt the credit card business straight.” said by an upmost payment industry’s administrative.
