Drip Capital, Mumbai-based fintech firm has gained $25 million (approx ₹172 crore) in Series B funding led by Accel. While, other participants in the round were Sequoia India, Wing VC, Y Combinator, GC1 Ventures, and Trusted Insight.
Till date, the company has raised over $45 million in equity and $55 million in debt funding.
Pushkar Mukewar, Co-founder and co-CEO, Drip Capital, said that the company will use the funds across three primary focus areas including geographic expansion in international markets of Southeast Asia as well as Latin America, developing new financial products, as well as doubling the head count of its product engineering teams.
Drip Capital was founded in 2014 by Pushkar Mukewar and Neil Kothari. Being a digital trade financing company, Drip Capital uses technology to provide small business exporters the working capital they need to grow their business.
At present the company has 25 product engineers, and the total team of 120 members spread across six offices.
“Trade finance is an age-old paper-based industry dominated by banks that primarily focus on large, established corporate customers. Hence, small businesses, despite accounting for 50 percent of merchandise exports from India, remain largely neglected. Our mission is to level the playing field for these small business exporters, not just in India but across emerging markets around the world,” Mukewar added.
While the platform’s offering is focussed on the niche use case of exports, the company is also piloting newer credit products that will also provide exporters working capital to fund their raw material supplies.
“With an automated system, Drip provides a seamless customer experience and can finance a shipment with the click of a button. On the backend, Drip integrates with multiple electronic data sources and has built proprietary algorithms to underwrite the risk of every shipment,” said Kothari.
Also, Abhinav Chaturvedi from Accel says, “We have been associated with Drip since its inception and have participated in all their funding rounds till date. It has been inspiring to see the company’s progress in the last two years. We are excited to support them in their next phase of growth as they take their business model global.”
The founders claim that the new product is expected to be formally rolled out in the next six months.
The company also claim that until now, it has discounted invoices and provided capital against $500 million of trade across 8000 transactions conclude by more than 400 exporters.
Some of the significant companies in the similar space include Drake Finance, United Capital, Capestone credit group, and others.