The round also saw participation from AdvantEdge Founders and several other prominent startup founders, including Razorpay’s Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar; Zetwerk’s Amrit Acharya and Rahul Sharma; Uni Cards founder Nitin Gupta; and Zolve’s Raghunandan G.
The company said it would use the funds to scale its presence and increase employee headcount across technology, product, customer success and business development.
Founded in January 2022 by Ujwal Kalra, Sambhav Jain and Avinash Uttav, Nakad is a deep-tier supply chain finance startup which provides working capital credit to small and medium enterprise (SME) suppliers of corporate vendors.
“Multiple industries have deep-tier supply chain networks and today’s supply chain financing companies mostly tackle the anchor supplier to the corporations, which now have enough options to cover for their working capital needs. Nakad works on deep-tier supply chain finance, where it caters to supplier of suppliers where the real issue of SME financing lies,” said Ujwal Kalra, cofounder and chief executive officer of Nakad.
The company leverages its proprietary technology platform,MicroBill, which tokenises invoices from these SMEs and helps them receive working capital credit from banks or non-banking finance companies (NBFCs) against these receivables.
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“Credit for MSMEs is a misnomer. B2B supply chain credit today is limited to large enterprises. This is because financial institutions find it extremely hard to access verified information of transactions between original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), tier-1, tier-2 and tier-3 suppliers. We are quite excited to partner with the Nakad team, which has built an amazing technology solution to this problem,” said Prayank Swaroop, partner at Accel.
Moving forward, the company is also looking to launch various other credit products as well as build software layers to help SMEs digitise their billing and reconciliation processes.
“Our thesis is that all supply chains in India are getting digitised with both B2B payments and transaction finance crucial to digital adoption and stickiness. Nakad is addressing a big opportunity in deep-tier supply chain financing. The founders have a unique approach to penetrating large industrial ecosystems with software and then driving formal payments and credit penetration among SMEs,” said Vikram Vaidyanathan, managing director, Matrix India.
In the coming months, Nakad also expects to expand its customer base across pharmaceuticals, chemical, auto construction, capital goods and consumer durables.
