CRED - the famous startup based in Bangalore, announced on Tuesday that it had raised $215 million in new funding round — a Series D — that valued the Indian startup at $2.2 billion (post-money), up from about $800 million in the $81 million Series C round in January.
The two-year-old Indian startup has become the country's youngest startup to be valued at $2 billion or more.
CRED operates an app that rewards customers for timely payment of credit card bills and provides them with access to a variety of additional services such as credit and a premium catalog of high-end brand products.
As of January, it had more than 6 million customers, accounting for roughly 22% of the country's credit card holder population - and 35% of all premium credit cardholders — in the world’s second-largest internet market.
Unlike most others in India, the startup does not target the typical TAM of India — hundreds of millions of users in the world's second-most populous country — but instead caters to some of the most affluent audiences.
The startup intends to use the additional funds to scale several of its revenue channels and conduct additional experiments.
“India has 57 million credit cards (versus 830 million debit cards) [that] largely serves the high-end market. The credit card industry is largely concentrated with the top 4 banks (HDFC, SBI, ICICI, and Axis) controlling about 70% of the total market. This space is extremely profitable for these banks – as evident from the SBI Cards IPO,” as per the analysts at Bank of America.
CRED is already addressing these concerns, according to Shah, one of India's most prolific angel investors who delivered one of the country's rare successful exits with his previous venture.
