Following the roadshow organised by Venture Gurukool in Beijing, a startup Venture Gurukool had interests in called Olly Credit, a fintech startup working out of New Delhi that offers micro credit cards, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding. This is its latest pre-series A round and comes from a significant strategic Chinese investor.
Olly had raised an undisclosed amount of funding in a previous seed round led by Incubate Fund; Mahendra Swarup, prolific angel investor and founder of Venture Gurukool, Startup India Association and former Kotak Mahindra Asset Management Company CEO, Sandesh Kirkire.
Olly Credit was founded in 2015 by Ashwin Bhambri, Ringaile Noq and Anand Kumar. It is a mobile-first platform that offers micro credit card with a dynamic credit limit of $307.4 (20,000 rupees). The startup caters primarily to young blue-collar professionals with a minimum monthly salary of $169 (11,000 rupees).
In more recent developments, Venture Gurukool, the company providing funding to early-stage startups, is set to launch its maiden venture capital fund towards the end of April 2018. The fund will invest in B2B and consumer tech Indian startups that have closely followed the business model and strategy of companies that made it big in China.
This particular fund targets to have a corpus of $20 million with a greenshoe option to raise another $20 million, a leading daily reported citing Mahendra Swarup, founder of Gurukool. Swarup was previously a partner at private equity firm Avigo Capital Partners and was president of Indian Venture Capital Association (IVCA).
The fund hopes to raise about 60 to 70 percent of its corpus from India, and the rest from China, Taiwan, South Korea and Indonesia. It is further noted that Gurukool has already tied up with three well established Chinese investors.
The Venture Gurukool fund will invest in seed rounds and the Chinese investors will invest in pre-series A and series A rounds.
This partnership with Chinese investors has been catalysed by India’s similarities with its neighbouring country demographics and consumer behaviour patterns. With this fund, Venture Gurukool hopes to join hands with a slew of Indian funds that are only a few years old.