2023 has been a forgettable year for India’s startup ecosystem, but it’s brought about some cheer at the very end.
Fintech startup Incred has become India’s second unicorn startup of 2023, after grocery firm Zepto had turned unicorn in August. Incred closed its Rs. 500 crore Series D funding round led by new and existing investors. The round valued Incred at Rs. 8,800 crore, or $1.05 billion.
“This funding commitment marks a significant milestone in our journey and takes us into the ranks of unicorns,” Incred founder and CEO Bhupinder Singh said. “Our goal is to make InCred a central part of every Indian family’s financial aspirations and to eventually list the business, unlocking significant value for all our shareholders,” he added.
Incred had been founded in 2016 by Bhupinder Singh. Singh had an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad and had spent 16 years working with Deutsche Bank, ending up becoming its Managing Director Investment Banking for Asia Pacific. He’d then quit and founded Incred, which aimed to provide financial services including personal, business and education loans. Incred had quickly acquired an NBFC license, and had become profitable in its first year of operations. In 2020, Incred had acquired fintech lending platform Qbera, and had merged with KKR India in 2022.
Incred now has offices in 24 cities across India, as well as in Singapore and the Middle East. It has strategic partnerships with Amazon and Flipkart to provide loans to their merchants, and has also tied up with a leading food delivery platform to provide credit facilities. The company now has Rs. 5,000 crore of assets under management, and its parent company registered a profit of Rs. 109 crore in FY23.
Incred has now gone ahead and become India’s second unicorn on 2023, and seems to be a deserving edition to the list — the company has attained the $1 billion valuation within six years of commencing operations, and is profitable to boot. But in spite of Incred becoming a unicorn, the number of unicorns created in 2023 in India stands at a dismal 2, far behind the 23 unicorns that had been minted in 2022, and a fraction of the 42 that had been created in 2022. After the heady days of the post-covid boom when unicorns were sprouting by the dozen, it appears that unicorns are again becoming as rare as the mythical beast they were originally named after.