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The concept of credit is something that is not new. People have been opting for credit since time immemorial. Credit is crucial when our capital cannot support certain investments, and credit cards had certainly made them easy to avail. However, paying the credit card bills is a priority and equally difficult to manage. This is why Cred decided to come forth with the unique idea of a platform that will help Indians pay their credit card bills on time and also offer them instant offers and rewards for the same.
Cred is a Fintech platform headquartered in Bengaluru, which allows its users to make credit card payments through its app and get exclusive offers and other benefits online. Furthermore, Cred has also introduced house rent payment options, short-term credit lines, and Cred Mint, with which the lenders can lend their idle money to the borrowers who exhibit decent credit scores at interests of around 9% per annum. If you are interested to learn more about Cred, its Startup Story, Founder and Team, Tagline, Logo, Business, and Revenue Model, Funding, Investors, Growth, Competitors, and more, you can go through the Cred success story below.
Cred - Company Highlights
| Startup Name | Cred |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Bengaluru, Karnataka, India |
| Sector | Financial Services |
| Founder | Kunal Shah |
| Founded | 2018 |
| Website | cred.club |
Cred - Latest News
November 19, 2021 - Cred is looking to acquire Dineout and Wint Wealth, striving to extend more services to its 7.5 million+ users.
October 21, 2021 - Credit card bill payments platform, Cred is looking to acquire HipBar, a liquor delivery startup from Chennai, and with it, the company will likely enter the wallet payments soon.
October 21, 2021 - Cred Founder, Kunal Shah and his brother Rohan Shah Naresh have joined HipBar Board and will be acquiring the prepaid payment instrument (PPI) license of the liquor delivery startup.
Cred - About
Cred - Startup Story
Cred - Founder and Team
Cred - Tagline, Slogan and Logo
Cred - Business Model
Cred - Revenue Model
Cred - Funding and Investors
Cred - Acquisitions
Cred - Growth
Cred - Competitors
Cred - FAQs
Cred - About
Cred is a Bangalore-based startup. It offers rewards to the consumers who use the platform for paying their credit card bills. The company protects the data and the information of the users very safely. Hence, the app is completely safe and secure.
Cred - Startup Story
The goal was very simple. It was to create a platform where life could be made better and systematic. The founder wanted to offer more privileges and benefits for the people having good credit scores. And therefore, creating a flywheel effect for more people was important to improve the scores. Everybody, starting from the startups to the government, has focused on the masses. The founder of the company wanted to focus specifically on the people, the responsible citizens who pay taxes timely. He felt that nobody had solved their problems earlier.
'If you look at history, nobody has been rewarded for paying back on time. We want to fix that.'
Therefore, Cred was founded primarily to solve the problems of the taxpayers and reward them with attractive rewards in return.
Cred - Founder and Team
Kunal Shah is the founder and the CEO of Cred. He is an Indian entrepreneur, who is credited for launching new ventures for a second time. Kunal was a Philosophy graduate from Wilson College and later went on to pursue MBA from the Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, but he dropped the course midway to chase his dreams as an entrepreneur. Kunal started his entrepreneurial journey with PaisaBack, a website for cashback, coupons, and other offers for the users along with Sandeep Tandon. However, he eventually shut down its operations in order to found FreeCharge, which the duo founded in 2010.
FreeCharge was acquired by Snapdeal in April 2015 but the company still continued as an independent entity led by Shah. He left the firm the next year and eventually founded Cred in 2018, which has successfully turned unicorn on April 6, 2021. FreeCharge, on the other hand, was acquired by Axis Bank in July 2017.
Kunal Shah was born in Mumbai in 1983. His hobbies include playing chess and poker. He loves munching on chips and guacamole. He loves the ideology of Socrates and the plays of G.B Shaw.
Cred - Tagline, Slogan and Logo
The tagline of the company is 'Suraksha Aur Bharosa Dono'.
Cred - Business Model
The business model of the company consists of four parts :
- The Cred app - The Cred app is a neat-looking, beautifully designed app, which the users can visit if they want to go through the offers that are available after they pay their credit card bills. They can easily sign up on the app and view all the offers that they can avail.
- Businesses that provide offers on the app - The users of Cred can also find a wide range of offers from numerous businesses. For this, CRED brings businesses onboard and collaborates with them. Along with benefitting CRED and its customers, who can avail of the exclusive offers provided by the businesses, it is also a win-win situation for the businesses. This is because they are also hugely benefited from the visibility they get.
- Users who pay their credit card bills - CRED also serves as a smooth and rewarding platform for the users who use it to pay their credit card bills. In comparison to banking or other apps, the end-users can choose CRED as an app to pay their credit card bills and get numerous offers and benefits. On the other hand, the users who like the app also share CRED with their family and friends.
- Cred Mint - Cred disclosed its new feature, Cred Mint on August 20, 2021, which is designed as a peer-to-peer lending platform help that will help Cred users lend their idle money to creditworthy members. It is a rather transparent process that only allows the trustworthy Cred members boasting of a minimal credit score of 750 or higher to be the borrowers. Furthermore, the lenders can also withdraw their money whenever they want with the interest that they have accumulated for the period.
Cred - Revenue Model
There are 2 prominent ways via which Cred earns its revenue:
- Listing products and offers - Cred, as we know, lists an array of products and offers that benefit its users from a range of businesses. These businesses, in turn, pay Cred a fee for their visibility. Every time a user avails of the offers, Cred generates an income through it.
- Using the financial data of the users - Cred accumulates the financial data from the users who use the platform for paying their bills and more. Along with providing Cred with the opportunity to introduce more offers to their users using these data, Cred also has other banks and financial institutions who pay them a fee for accessing these data. These companies, banks, and financial institutions would eventually approach the potential customers with their own set of products aligned to their tastes.
Cred - Funding and Investors
Cred has raised a total amount of $722.2 million in funding over the 8 funding rounds that the brand has witnessed. The last Series E funding round that the company saw was co-led by its existing investors, Tiger Global and Falcon Edge on October 19, 2021, and was worth around $251 million. DST Global, Insight Partners, Coatue, Sofina, RTP, and Dragoneer were some other investors that took part in the Series E round of fundraising. In the meanwhile, Cred also two new investors - the London-based Marshall Wace and Steadfast Venture Capital to its captable.
The company is currently valued at $4.01 billion, as of October 19, 2021, after the conclusion of its funding round.
| Date | Transaction Name | Money Raised | Lead Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| October 19, 2021 | Series E | $251 million | Tiger GLobal and Falcon Edge |
| April 6, 2021 | Series D | $215 million | Coatue, Falcon Edge Capital and others |
| January 1, 2021 | Post-IPO Secondary Round | - | - |
| November 30, 2020 | Series C | $81 million | DST Global |
| July 26, 2019 | Series B | $120 million | Gemini Investments, Ribbit Capital and Sequoia Capital India |
| April 16, 2019 | Series A | $24 million | - |
| January 1, 2019 | Seed Round | - | Rainmatter Technology |
| November 6, 2018 | Seed Round | $30 million | Sequoia Capital India |
Cred is funded by 29 investors in total, as per August 23, 2021, with the recent investors being Dragoneer Investment Group and Tiger Global Management.
PV Vyshnavi
Cred - Acquisitions
Cred has acquired 1 company, Hipbar till now, which it acquired on October 21, 2021. The company is further looking to acquire Noida-based dining and restaurant tech solutions platform, Dineout, and the alternate investment platform, Wint Wealth, as per the reports dated November 19, 2021. The Dineout acquisition is reported to be between $25-50 mn while that of Wint Wealth is expected to be somewhere around $50 mn.
Cred - Growth
Cred has shown steady growth throughout the years. Being a startup that was founded in 2018, it successfully joined the unicorn club on April 6, 2021, closing its Series D round where the company had mopped up $215 million. CRED controls "22% of all credit card payments in India on a monthly basis,” said Kunal Shah in his statement released in April 2021.
Kunal Shah further took to his Linkedin profile on July 10, 2021, and shared highlights of the milestones reached by CRED in the month of June:
Cred introduced Cred Mint on August 20, 2021, which will serve as a peer-to-peer lending feature that can be used by the customers of CRED. Cred Mint has been launched by Cred in collaboration with RBI-approved P2P Non-Banking Financial Company (NBFC), Liquiloans. With this feature, the Cred members can now lend money to the trustworthy members of Cred based on the predefined interest rates. Cred Mint can be used to lend another creditworthy user to help them earn around 9% per credit. However, it is also declared that Cred Mind will only be available for users with decent credit scores.
Cred might soon be foraying into the wallet payments space with the upcoming acquisition of HipBar, a liquor delivery startup based in Chennai. Founder Kunal Shah and his brother have already joined HipBar board in order to make the acquisition feasible and thereby receive the PPI license. It completed its acquisition of Hipbar on October 21, 2021.
Michelle D’souza
Cred - Competitors
The top competitors of the company are Paytm, PhonePe and MobiKwik.
- Paytm is the top competitor of Cred. It is a fintech app and payments platform that is headquartered in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India, and was founded in 2010.
- PhonePe is another notable competitor of Cred. It is also a digital payment and financial services platform headquartered in Bangalore, India, which was founded in 2015. This app has the largest market share of 46.04%, as of July 2021.
- MobiKwik is yet another fintech company, which supports digital payment options and is a rival of Cred at the same time. It is headquartered at Gurugram, Haryana, India, and was founded in 2009.
The other competitors of Cred include digital payment applications and fintech companies like Google Pay, Amazon Pay, and more.
Shubham Kumar
Cred - FAQs
Is the Cred app safe?
Approved by the NPCI and acknowledged by the RBI, the Cred app is completely safe for the users.
Is Cred approved by the RBI?
Cred provides digital payment services to its customers and is in compliance with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), a payment system operator approved by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Therefore, Cred is certainly approved by RBI as well.
What is Cred?
Cred is an app that works like a credit card payments solution and which helps its users get amazing offers and benefits in return. The users only need to register on the app to enable them to pay their credit card bills and lend money online via the Cred Mint, which the app introduced on August 20, 2021.
Is Cred protect free?
Yes, it is completely free for the Cred users.
Author: Anik Banerjee
Source : https://startuptalky.com/cred-success-story/
Date : 2021-11-19T07:26:00.000Z