We are incredibly excited to announce our investment in Vayana Network, India’s largest supply chain finance platform that connects corporates and their supply chains to financial institutions for quick and low-cost access to trade finance.
The Indian trade finance market is ripe for digitization. Around 90% of Indian corporates do not have a supply chain financing platform for their retailers and distributors, leaving India’s supply chain financing market drastically underserved. Historically, trade transactions were hard to trace and authenticate, but with the digitization of the economy and supportive regulation, tracing transactions is now possible, enabling low-friction lending. As the largest platform in the space, Vayana stands to be the biggest beneficiary of this shift.
Vayana is disrupting the trade credit economics to reach the unserved SMB market. Vayana has built out extensive and proprietary capabilities to embed itself within the workflow of 18 major Indian lenders, giving them access to unprecedented data sources. The multiple data sources, including over 80M e-invoices that Vayana has processed, enable lenders to make better underwriting decisions. This is a large and growing moat for the company as banks start building their underwriting intelligence on top of this data. With scale, Vayana is the beneficiary of a powerful flywheel. As it amasses the largest community of vetted SMB borrowers, Vayana will continue to attract more lenders, resulting in lower rates, and large enterprises bringing their trade and SMB customers onto the platform.
As the company has grown 20x on quarterly financing values over the last 4 years, it comes as no surprise that Vayana has a solid team of entrepreneurs, supply chain finance professionals, former commercial bankers and tech talent to win the SCF market. We are deeply impressed by Ram Iyer’s ambition, tenacity, insight, and leadership ability to execute his vision of building the connective tissue for supply chain finance in India.
With this capital raise, Vayana will continue investing in its technology, and increase its geographical sales coverage. We look forward to working with Ram and the Vayana team as they transform India’s financial infrastructure for SMB lending and credit. To learn more about Vayana, please visit www.vayana.com.