Rupeek, a gold loans lending platform, based out of Bengaluru, has bagged $30 million (approx ₹213 crore) funding in a round led by Bertelsmann India, with other participants such as Accel and Sequoia India.
The infused funds will be use to support the company’s product development and market expansion.
Sumit Maniyar, founder and CEO of Rupeek said, “We will be using our proprietary tech hardware to ensure standardisation, fairness, and scalability in gold purity assessment. The investment will also help us rapidly scale across new markets.”
Rupeek was founded by Sumit Maniyar and Ashwin Soni in 2015. The platform aims to bring transparency in the gold loans lending space and monetise India’s idle gold. While, the company said that this will generate liquidity which in turn will increase economic activity.
The platform also claims to offer a 30-minutes doorstep service for gold loans, on-demand pickup and return of the valuables. Rupeek has partnered with banks such as Federal Bank and Karur Vysya Bank.
Furthermore, the company claims to be currently disbursing gold loans at an annual run rate of over $150 Mn and has a growth rate of 20% month on month.
GV Ravishankar, managing director, Sequoia Capital India said, “Their efficient use of technology to scale the credit evaluation and disbursement process has resulted in over 10x growth in the last 12 months. Today, their business model is contributing significantly towards creating a strong value proposition for banks to provide credit access to small businesses at affordable rates.”
India currently holds 27K tonnes of gold worth more than $1 Tn, out of which only 6-7% is monetized through the organised market, said the company.
The unorganized market is estimated to be three times the size of the organised gold loan market of $90 Bn per annum, the company further said.
The gold loan space has mostly been dominated by Non-banking financial institutions (NBFC’s) like Muthoot Finance and Manappuram Finance.
Some of the significant platform with similar objective includes Paytm, PhonePe, Google Pay, and many more.