Bengaluru based mostly fintech startup, Velocity, has raised a complete of $10.three million in seed funding led by Valar Ventures, a US-based VC agency backed by Peter Thiel. This marks Valar Venture’s first funding in an Indian startup.
The funds will likely be utilized by Velocity for ramping up its buyer base and for constructing financing merchandise for the companies of tomorrow.
Velocity facilitates revenue-based financing as much as Rs 2 crore ($280Okay) with zero fairness dilution or private ensures.
Revenue-based financing is a brand new, extra versatile various to enterprise capital or financial institution debt, whereby repayments occur as a hard and fast proportion of future revenues. The enterprise claims that with Velocity, any enterprise with digitally trackable revenues can simply share entry to their on-line knowledge and get funded inside per week.
Velocity at the moment focuses on the fast-growing section of on-line market retailers and direct-to-consumer companies in India. This section is booming because the shift from offline to on-line retail bought accelerated put up COVID. Over 300 on-line companies have signed up for Velocity’s revenue-based financing.
Launched in early 2020 by IIT Bombay graduates, Abhiroop Medhekar, Atul Khichariya and Saurav Swaroop, Velocity already funds crores of selling and stock spends for its prospects each month, with no assortment delays or stress in its portfolio thus far.
With this funding, Velocity additionally introduced the launch of its digital advertising and marketing centered Visa company bank cards in partnership with SBM Bank. Online companies spend as much as 30 % of their revenues on digital advertising and marketing however primarily find yourself utilizing a private bank card for this. Velocity goals to offer a company bank card for the digital advertising and marketing use case, which permits on-line companies to “put their marketing on autopilot”.
Talking about Velocity and the India alternative, James Fitzgerald, a founding associate at Valar Ventures, mentioned, “As one of the fastest growing economies in the world, India’s digital ecosystem is at an inflection point. We have been impressed with Velocity’s strong customer orientation and aggressive plans to build innovative financing solutions. We believe the Velocity team will empower thousands of entrepreneurs in India and we are excited to be partners with them in that.”
“Having been a VC and a founder myself, I strongly felt the need to reimagine financing products for new age businesses. Incumbents fall short on the speed, efficiency and flexibility expected by today’s entrepreneurs. We want to change that. We are thrilled to have Valar Ventures support our audacious vision of building the future of business financing in India.” mentioned Abhiroop Medhekar, Co-founder and CEO at Velocity.
Other traders who participated in Velocity’s seed rounds embrace founding traders Mato Peric and Tom Stafford (DST Global) in addition to Presight Capital, Utsav Somani’s iSeed, Oliver Jung (LAO Holdings), Robert Frohwein (Kabbage), Dhruv Arora (Syfe) and Erik Podzuweit & Florian Prucker (Scalable Capital).
Valar Ventures is a enterprise capital fund based mostly within the United States, based by Andrew McCormack, James Fitzgerald and Peter Thiel. The agency is thought for investing in fast-growing fintech corporations which might be pursuing enormous market alternatives, akin to Xero, Wise (previously SwitchWise), BlockFi, N26, Qonto, Stash and others.
