Unifi Capital

Alternative Investment
Fund

First Alternative Finance - Round Table - July 12, 2019

Unifi High Yield AIF hosted its first Alternative Finance - Round Table on July 12, 2019 in Bengaluru. Four of India’s cutting edge Fintechs, represented by their Founders presented their business cases, tech –methodology and risk management practices. The Round table format was used to facilitate debate and discussion to test if these fast growing business models are sustainable over the long haul.
The partner-invitees were appreciative of the event and mentioned that it was quite purposeful to them as they now would look beyond the template driven credit ratings and develop comfort from the focused people, robust process and discernible prospects of these emerging NBFCs. They also felt it was timely as it addressed the fears and doubts in their minds about the NBFC space which has been facing liquidity and confidence crisis lately.

Event Speakers

SANJAY SHARMA - AYE FINANCE

Sanjay Sharma is the promoter of Aye Finance that's making rapid strides in the under-served MSME lending space with its unique cluster - based profiling approach since 2014. Backed by marquee PE investors including Google, Sanjay and his team plan to scale up their financing support to 5 lakh Micro enterprises in the next 5 years from their current base of 1.2 lakh enterprises ( Rs. 25 - 100 lakhs trunover p.a ). Sanjay is an IIT & IIM alumnus and held varied senior roles for over 2 decades in the consumer finance divisions of HDFC, HSBC and ICICI before founding Aye finance.

RUCHI KALRA - OFBUSINESS

Ruchi Kalra is the co- founder of ofBuisness, a technology driven company providing raw material procrurement financing to SMEs in the maufacturing sector. Its unique tech - platform offers services like tender aggregation, bulk purchase discounts and bidding platform to SMEs saving them time and cost. Started in 2016, ofbusiness has scaled up profitably to have lending relationship with more than 2200 + SMEs. Ruchi was previously a partner at Mckinsey and a senior business analyst at Evalueserve. She is an MBA from ISB with a B. Tech degree in chemical engineering from IIT, Delhi.

STEVE HARDGRAVE-VARTHANA

Steve Hardgrave is the co-founder of varthana, a company dedicated to improving education infrastructure in low-and middle-income localities by providing financing support to Affordable Private Schools. Varthana's customised solutions have helped 3500+ schools across 15+ states upgrade their quality benefitting more than 2.5 million students. Prior to starting Varthana in 2012, Steve worked in Impact Investment funds like Omidyar and Gray Ghost Ventures. Steve is an MBA from the Haas School of Business, Berkeley and a BA in economics from University of California, LA.

MADHUSUDAN EKAMBARAM-KRAZYBEE

Madhusudan Ekambaram is the co-founder and CEO of Krazybee, a fintech NBFC that offers small ticket short tenor personal loans to young professionals across India. Started in 2016, Krazybee now has 4+ lakhs active borrowers with 60+ % repeat customers. Rigorous appraisal backed by its proprietary analytics engine has helped Krazybee in building a good quality profitable book. Madhu is an engineering graduate from NITK, Suratkal. He has cross functional experience from his 11 -year stint in Huawei Technologies including the launch of e-commerce vertical in over 10 Asian countries.