The Working Capital Provider: Manish Kumar, CEO and Founder, KredX Prior to his venture, Kumar worked with various banks and financial institutions, investing a significant portion of his time in the financial services space

Every business is different with its financial challenges and KredX aims to help startups, large enterprises, MSMEs, retailers, and distributors resolve their working capital and growth capital challenges. Founded by Manish Kumar and Anurag Jain in 2015, KredX has catered to 40,000 businesses so far. "KredX was conceptualized as the answer to India's working capital problem - which has paralyzed small businesses in spite of being a major contributor to India's GDP. It has since evolved to become India's largest supply chain finance platform with a new-age plug-and-play ecosystem of finance and cash management products," shares Manish Kumar, CEO and Founder, KredX.

Prior to his venture, Kumar worked with various banks and financial institutions, investing a significant portion of his time in the financial services space, "This experience provided me with detailed knowledge of the financial landscape and its inherent challenges. Delving deeper, I became aware of the imbalance between accounts payables and accounts receivables, which often resulted in a cash flow mismatch within the business ecosystem. This led to the realization that this disparity could be addressed by leveraging the concept of bill discounting, rooted in the ancient financial instrument known as 'hundi'."

Citing the example of Hundi, a bill-like instrument inscribed in vernacular languages has been a part of our culture for centuries, Kumar says that despite its longstanding usage, the hundi had never been formalized, "KredX, through the infusion of advanced technology and adaptive business models, developed an innovative invoice discounting platform aimed at addressing working capital challenges."

Over the years, the startup has improved its flagship product through customer feedback, "Our customers validated the need for a onestop solution catering to all aspects of supply chain finance beyond invoice discounting and we too realized the need to go deeper into the supply chain."

Wanting to make KredX a one-stop-solution for Supply Chain Financing, the duo launched more products- Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) for all kinds of B2B payments viz; online or offline and to achieve the unthinkable in MSME financing of disbursals in under two minutes.

It also has a proprietary risk mechanism called the KredX score, which follows a three-pronged approach and assigns a score to each borrower post-evaluation to determine their risk level. In 2023, it executed several cross-border trade finance transactions for large enterprises with an annualised value of more than USD 200 million.One of the primary challenges that it faced was establishing credibility and gaining the trust of both businesses and investors along with navigating the complex regulatory landscape governing the financial services industry.

On building KredX, he shares that customer-centricity and strategic partnerships have played an important role. "We are constantly innovating and creating new products." Up next, it plans to focus on pan-India penetration with an increased emphasis on rural areas, and launch services in entire GCC countries.

Factsheet:

Amount of funding received: $33M

Year of inception: 2015

No. of employees: 200+

Presence: India, Middle East and Singapore