Mumbai, Maharashtra, India – 09/20/2022: A man checks his mobile phone near the Cred logo during the Global Fintech Fest in Mumbai.
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Indian fintech startup Cred is set to raise $900 million in a funding round led by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, but has lost founder and CEO Kunal Shah to WhatsApp.
The startup, in which Mehta will soon be a minority investor, was valued at more than $4 billion in its latest funding round, the Indian company said in a press release on Monday. It added that these funds will be used to “accelerate growth, build organizational strength and extend leadership across categories.”
Cred is a platform built for affluent and creditworthy Indians that rewards you for using it to manage and pay your credit card bills. The company was founded by Shah less than a decade ago and currently processes more than 40% of the country’s credit card bill payments and is building a lending business, he said.
Meanwhile, Meta’s WhatsApp, which has 500 million people in India using its messaging service, has struggled to gain traction with its payment tool WhatsApp Pay in India’s competitive digital payments space.
According to the release, the social media giant will not have access to Cred’s member data. In return, Mehta gained access to Shah, who will replace Will Cathcart in the leadership role at WhatsApp.
“Although we have made considerable progress, there are significant gaps between WhatsApp today and its full potential,” Shah said in a post on X.
Cred investors say the serial fintech entrepreneur has played a pivotal role in the company’s success, creating a loyal user base of over 170 million credit-worthy Indians.
“The company (Cred) has created a category, amassed millions of loyal users, and built a healthy economic engine,” Shailendra Singh, managing director of PeakXV Partners, said in a release.
He added that Creed’s “extraordinary success is due to Kunal (Shah)”.
But while Cred scores high in generating engagement, data from Tracxn, an Indian startup intelligence platform, shows that the company is yet to turn a profit. However, in a post about X, Shah claimed that the company had its “first profitable quarter.”
Mr. Shah will move to Meta, while Mr. Miten Sampat, who was driving strategy and finance at Credo, will become interim CEO. At the same time, the Indian company said its board will continue to “build an appropriate leadership structure for an eventual IPO.”
