ENA Economy 2018-06-22 08:31:27 <p><strong>New Delhi, June 22 (KNN) </strong>India and California based SME lending startup Drip Capital has raised $15 Mn of an equity funding round from Accel, Sequoia India and Wing VC investors.</p> <p>In this latest funding round, existing investors along with Y-Combinator who had earlier invested $5M also participated.</p> <p>Drip Capital has also raised an undisclosed amount of debt capital from Silicon Valley Bank and other banks.</p> <p>The startup intends to use the raised funds to scale up operations in India and for modifying models in other geographical areas.</p> <p>Commenting on the recent development, Mohit Bhatnagar, Managing Director, Sequoia Capital India Advisors, said, With a partner like Drip Capital, emerging market exporters now never say no to a new order due to working capital constraints. This offers a huge boost to small and medium businesses which play such a significant role in Indias trade network.</p> <p>Founded in 2014, Drip Capital started with India as the first exporter market. It works towards providing working capital finance to emerging small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) that are indulged in the cross-border trade.</p> <p>It aims to create a lending platform for the existing SMEs and accelerate global trade. It employs alternative data and technology to underwire and finance cross-border transactions.</p> <p>The company claims to have already funded over $100M of trade flows across industries in the last 18 months.</p> <p>With a slowdown in bank lending and delays in GST input tax credit, Pushkar Mukewar, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Drip, believes that Drip has entered the Indian market for exporters at a right time when large number of MSMEs are facing problems of working capital crunch.</p> <p>Reviewing the Indian loan market situation and PSUs stricter norms in facilitating financial support to MSMEs, he said that the working capital gap in India is quite large.</p> <p>Where SMEs contribute to 40% of exports, however, experience 50% rejection rates from banks for trade finance, he added.</p> <p>Our assessment is based on trade performance rather than asset value which allow us to effectively service SME exporters, Neil Kothari, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Drip added.</p> <p>Drip Capital had also funded an agro-commodity exporter from Andhra Pradesh by providing collateral-free facility to the exporter.</p> 20139 http://knnindia.co.in/news/newsdetails/economy/sme-lender-drip-capital-raises-15-mn-via-fresh-round-of-equity-funding 2018-06-22 08:31:27 knnindia.co.in