Sachin Bansal through his Navi Technologies Buys DHFL General Insur for ₹100 Cr - Report

Flipkart co-founder and former CEO, Sachin Bansal, has reportedly acquired DHFL General Insurance from Wadhawan Global Capital (WGC) for around Rs. 100 crore. The acquisition, which is said to be a distress sale for Kapil Wadhawan-led WGC group, has been done via Sachin Bansal co-founded Navi Technologies, reported media outlets including Economic Times and Business Today.

With this acquisition deal, Sachin Bansal has entered into insurance business, besides being a prominent investors in technology startups such as Ola, Vogo and Bounce, among others.

WGC, which is the parent company of Dewan Housing Finance Limited (DHFL), has admitted for bankruptcy recently. According to the reports, Navi Technologies (formerly BAC Acquisitions) has bought out the entire stake in DHFL. Navi was co-founded by Bansal with his IIT-Delhi batchmate Ankit Agarwal after selling his stake in Flipkart.

Notably, WGC also owns other financial services entities such as Aadhar Housing Finance, Avanse Financial Services, DHFL Pramerica Asset Managers, DHFL Pramerica Life Insurance and DHFL General Insurance.

DHFL is also an investor in a few startups. In 2017, EarlySalary, a Pune-based startup that offers Salary Advances and Instant Cash Loans, had raised funding of $4 Million co-led by DHFL.

To recall, last month Navi Technologies has also acquired Mavenhive, a Bengaluru-based technology consulting firm.

Navi is also an investor in grocery and milk delivery startup MilkBasket, which had raised Rs 20 crore ( ~ US$2.863 million) in venture debt led by Navi Technologies in April last year.

The acquisition report comes within a few hours after Bansal's another fintech venture, Chaitanya India Fin Credit, has applied for universal bank license from India's central bank RBI. Sachin Bansal holds majority stake in Chaitanya India Fin Credit, which is a microlending firm and got a NBFC license from RBI in the year 2009. Bansal has invested Rs 739 crore in Chaintanya, in September last year.

In 2016, Sachin Bansal along with his Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal were chosen for the extremely prestigious "Asian of the Year" as part of a group called the "The Disruptors" by the Straits Times of Singapore.

FinTech Startup EarlySalary Raises $4M in Series A from IDG Ventures India & DHFL

EarlySalary, India’s FinTech startup to offer Salary Advances and Instant Cash Loans has announced its Series A funding of $4 Million from IDG Ventures India (IDGVI) and Dewan Housing Finance Corp Ltd (DHFL).

The company focuses on helping young working professionals get Instant Loans and Salary Advances in minutes and is fast becoming the first line of credit to young working Indians. More than 80% of its customer base is in their first career roles and most of them are new to credit and are first time borrowers. Over the past year, EarlySalary developed its Underwriting System which is a self-learning Algo Based Decisioning System. The System in real time reviews Social Media and Credit Bureau data of customers and helps approve the loan for them.

Targeted at young working professionals with a clear focus, - ‘1st line of Credit for young working Indians’, Akshay Mehrotra, Co-Founder & CEO commented ‘We are very excited to have IDG Ventures India and DHFL as Investors on Board and this combination and capital will provide the necessary growth impetus and management depth needed to accelerate growth and the innovation process at EarlySalary.

Ashish Goyal, Co-Founder & CFO further added, ‘As a team, we are focused on solving the problem of providing access to instant credit & cash for a short period of time and at a reasonable price all time anytime’.

Speaking on this occasion, Karthik Prabhakar, Director, IDG Ventures India Advisors said, ‘We believe FinTech firms are changing the way India will bank and EarlySalary’s capability of using Social Media based Underwriting decisioning will help many young working professionals get access to credit which is otherwise not possible. This over a period of time will create a wealth of information on credit-worthy customers, to offer more diverse products through partners’.

Commenting on the development, Harshil Mehta, CEO, DHFL said, “We see a potential opportunity in EarlySalary which is led by an enterprising and talented group of founding members. The financial technology space in India is at an exciting stage and is steadily making deep inroads into the BFSI industry supported by cutting edge technology. We look forward to a synergistic association that will enable us to leverage their technology solutions, and to working closely with the team as they scale up the business.”

The Series A capital will be primarily deployed in three particular areas, vizz:
1. Build leverage on capital deployed for building products and lending book
2. Expand team specifically in skill sets of machine learning.
3. Grow customer base and provide 200,000 loans in this FY

EarlySalary was co-founded by Akshay Mehrotra and Ashish Goyal 18 months back and had raised Seed Funding from Ashok Agarwal of Transcorp International. Till date, the app has received 3,50,000+ downloads across its Android & iOS mobile app platform. The company has distributed 15,000+ loans to customers borrowing between Rs.8,000 to Rs.1,00,000 at a low cost of Rs.9 per Rs.10,000 per day. The company also partners with many large Corporates as well as SMEs across the country to give Salary Advances to employees.