Company type | Private |
---|---|
Industry |
|
Founded | 2018 |
Founder | Kunal Shah (Co-founder & CEO) |
Headquarters | Bangalore, Karnataka, India |
Revenue | ₹1,400 crore (US$180 million) (FY23) [1] |
₹−1,347 crore (US$−170 million) (FY23) [1] | |
Number of employees | 800 |
Website | cred |
CRED is an Indian fintech company, based in Bangalore. [2] [3] [4] Founded in 2018 by Kunal Shah, [5] [6] it is a reward-based credit card payments app. [7] Cred also lets users make house rent payments [8] and provides short-term credit lines. [9] Cred has received criticism for being overvalued and lacking a sound monetization strategy. [10] [11]
Cred was founded in 2018 by Kunal Shah. By 2021, the company had onboarded over 5.9 million users and processed about 20% of all credit card bill payments in India. [12]
Kunal Shah describes Cred as being a TrustTech company rather than a FinTech, and that his motivation to start Cred comes from solving trust issues in the Indian society, which he believes is key to economic prosperity [13]
Cred raised funding from DST Global, [14] Sequoia Capital (India), [15] [16] and Tiger Global, [17] among other investors, through the four rounds of private funding so far. [18] Cred posted losses of ₹360.31 crore in the 2020 fiscal year (FY20), [19] caused primarily due to high expenditure on marketing and advertising. [20]
In October 2021, Cred started to seek new investors, reporting a $5.5 billion valuation, up from $2.2 billion recorded in April 2021. [21] [22]
Kunal Shah is also an investor in an AI led adtech influencer marketing platform Kofluence. The company had raised a pre-series funding of $4 Million as of 8 February 2022. [23]
In June 2022, CRED raised $80 million in a Series F funding round led by Singapore's sovereign wealth fund, GIC. The Series F funding round will value the company at around $6.4 billion. [24]
Investor | Transaction Name | Fund Raised [25] | Valuation |
---|---|---|---|
Sequoia Capital India | Seed | $30M | Not Revealed |
Sequoia Capital, RTP Ventures, and 25 others | Series A | $636K | |
Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital, and seven others | Series B | $120M | $450 Million |
DST Global, Tiger Global Management, and seven others | Series C | $81M | $806 Million |
Coatue, Insight Partners, and nine others | Series D | $215M | $2.2 Billion |
Tiger Global Management, Marshall Wace, and eight others | Series E | $251M | $4.01 Billion |
GIC Singapore, Tiger Global Management, and three others | Series F | $80M | $6.4 Billion |
Cred became the official sponsor for the Indian Premier League for four years from 2020 to 2023. [26] In 2021, Cred's advertising content and videos, made in-house featuring Indian celebrities, [27] [28] [29] generated significant discourse in news and social media [30] [31] [32] [33] due to its peculiarity, which was both criticized [34] and praised. [35]
In 2021, Cred acquired expense management startup Happay in December and a liquor delivery startup HipBar. [36]
In December 2022, Cred acquired a 100% stake in CreditVidya that offers lending as a service. This is to allow Cred to expand its customer base and ecosystem as CreditVidya, which caters to customers who do not have a credit score. [36]
In July 2023, Cred acquihired savings and investment platform Spenny and expanded in the lending and wealthtech space further. [37]
In February 2024, Cred acquired online wealth management startup Kuvera for an undisclosed amount. With this acquisition, Cred entered the into the mutual funds market. [38]
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