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MSME lender Lendingkart raises $10 million via ECB for onward lending to small businesses

The capital was raised from a fund managed by impact investment manager BlueOrchard that has so far invested over $11 billion across more than 100 countries.

MSME lender Lendingkart has raised $10 million via external commercial borrowing from a fund managed by impact investment manager BlueOrchard, the company announced on Tuesday. The funding will be deployed for onward lending activities to MSMEs. 

BlueOrchard connects entrepreneurs in emerging and frontier markets with investors for impact investment. The company has so far invested over $11 billion across more than 100 countries. Till December 2023, BlueOrchard had backed over 300 million people in emerging and frontier markets with investments. 

As an MSME finance specialist, Lendingkart will continue to support small and micro businesses to flourish, create jobs, drive economic development, and foster entrepreneurship, thereby contributing to overall socio-economic progress,” said Harshvardhan Lunia, Founder and CEO, Lendingkart Group on the new fundraise. 

The company had posted a net profit of Rs 116 crore at a group level for FY23 and had raised Rs 200 crore in long-term debt funding from the growth-stage debt financing platform EvolutionX Debt Capital in June 2023. 

In February this year, the company had entered into a co-lending arrangement with Mahindra Group’s non-banking financial company (NBFC) Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services (Mahindra Finance) for latter to foray into the co-lending space for MSME loans. 

Importantly, growth in loans given by non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) to the MSME sector was more than three times that of banks, benefitting from their ability to offer customised financing solutions, according to a report by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in December last year on the performance of the banking sector during 2022-23 and 2023-24 till December.