Supply chain financing startup Mintifi raises $110 million in funding led by Premji Invest

Almost 90% of the raise is primary with the rest coming in through secondary sale of shares to provide liquidity to employees and early investors in the company.

According to Mintifi, it will use a large part of the current raise to expand its loan book, and focus on growth of disbursals on its platform. It is also expected to use the capital to bolster its technology platform and offer a software product to corporate partners helping them to monitor supply-chain distribution.

Founded in 2017 by Anup Agarwal, Ankit Mehta and Sanjoy Shome, Mintifi works towards digitising the supply chain for corporates such as Tata Motors, Jockey, Parle Agro and others, while providing purchase finance to their distributors. This allows distributors of these companies to buy more inventory and pay-later.

The new raise comes a year after the startup raised $40 million in fresh capital led by Norwest Venture Partners and Elevation Capital.

“Our focus will be on purchase financing and the growth opportunity in the segment. We believe it is a $50 billion opportunity and we will be digressing if we offer multiple lending products. So the focus will be on one single lending product. Having said we are building a SaaS (software-as-a-service) solution to improve supply chain efficiencies,” said Agarwal in an interaction with ET.

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The software startup will also help corporates bring distributors and retailers on one single platform, helping them monitor inventory and avoid revenue leakages.Mintifi’s purchase financing offering competes with the likes of those offered by supply-chain financing startup, KredX and OfBusiness’ finance arm Oxyzo.

While these companies offer multiple credit products such as invoice discounting and work directly with SMEs, Mintifi has continued to strictly focus on the purchase financing piece and work directly with corporates.

Over the past year, with the regulator providing further regulatory clarity on the sector, private equity majors such as TPG, Premji Invest, Advent International have taken a liking to digital lending businesses and led over $100 million fundraises in the likes of KreditBee, EarlySalary among others.

Norwest and Premji Invest have also separately backed EarlySalary and KreditBee.

“Mintifi is addressing the whitespace in supply chain financing in a highly differentiated manner through its distinctly modular platform and powerful anchor-led and tech-driven origination, underwriting and collection process. Its flexible supply-chain finance solutions create a win-win situation for anchors, distributors, and retailers and have demonstrated great product market fit,” said Saravanan Nattanmai, principal, Premji Invest.

Avendus Capital acted as the financial advisor to Mintifi on this transaction.

At present, Mintifi has close to 150 corporate partners and has disbursed $1.7 billion in purchase financing credit till date.

On a monthly basis, it is disbursing $100 million in credit and expected to scale this to $350 million by March 2024, said Agarwal. The average loan size for the firm is roughly about Rs 15 lakh. The company looks to exit FY24 with credit disbursement of $3 billion on an annual basis.

Mintifi has been profitable and is looking to exit FY23 with a profit after tax of $8 million to $10 million, Agarwal added.