Chiratae-backed alternative financing fintech Getvantage gets NBFC licence

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Chiratae Ventures-backed alternative financing fintech platform Getvantage has secured a non-banking financial company (NBFC) licence from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), a development that will help the company scale up its financing operations.

Getvantage, which claims to be the first and only revenue-based financing and alternative funding platform in India to get an NBFC licence, said on May 4 that it would run lending operations through GetGrowth Capital, its NBFC arm.

"We are grateful to lead by example and push for greater compliance with regulations in this space for all players. Being unlicensed is not an option. This milestone will enable us to accelerate our growth trajectory, expand our reach and offer more value to our customers,” Getvantage founder and CEO Bhavik Vasa said.

The company would capitalise the NBFC with Rs 50 crore and look to raise Rs 200 crore in total to scale up lending, Getvantage said in a statement.

Getvantage said that it was on track to hit annual disbursements of over Rs 500 crore in short-term working capital finance and aimed to lend to more than 1,000 emerging small and medium enterprises (SMEs) over the next 18 months.

It would provide working capital to sectors like business-to-business software-as-a-service (B2B SaaS), cleantech, direct-to-customer (D2C) , electric vehicle (EV) and infrastructure, e-commerce, quick-service restaurants (QSRs) among others, the fintech firm said. The company has estimated the working capital for SMEs market at $300 billion.

Founded in 2020 by former EbixCash executive Vasa along with tech and ops veteran Amit Srivastava, GetVantage enables startups to get access to loans between $10,000 and $500,000 within days from lending partners, based on the revenue performance of these companies.

It claims to have facilitated funding to over 500 new-economy businesses over the last 18 months. The company last raised $36 million led by Varanium Nexgen Fintech Fund, DMI Sparkle Fund, and existing investors Chiratae Ventures and Dream Incubator Japan.

Getvantage joins a growing list of fintech companies seeking and securing NBFC licences to expand their market share with differentiated lending offerings.

As reported by Moneycontrol, Walmart-backed PhonePe, which is making forays into digital lending, is also seeking an NBFC licence. Besides PhonePe, neobanking platform Jupiter has also secured an NBFC licence.

Earlier this year, Moneycontrol wrote how lending-focused startups had cornered PE/VC (private equity and venture capital) funding in 2023, despite the so-called funding winter.