Fintech startup Bold Finance has raised a seed round of $1.5 million. This round has been led by Kae Capital, with participation from existing investor Antler India and angel investors such as Nitin Gupta (Uni Cards), Ishpreet Gandhi (Stride Ventures), Shashikant Dola (McKinsey & Company), Tushar Mehndiratta (Avail Finance), Vadiraj Kulkarni (CEO, ITC PSPD) and some others.

Mumbai-based, Bold Finance is founded by two IIT Roorkee alumni, Nikhil Jain and Durgesh Suthar. Speaking on the announcement, Nikhil Jain, Co-founder, Bold Finance shared, “Gold loan is mostly a distress or a working capital loan, wherein customers need it urgently. In such a situation, ease of access in hyper-local neighbourhoods, longer operating hours, and low-interest rates are paramount to customers. Bold Finance is smartly placed to cater to such customers and deliver safe, fast and trusted loans in the market.”

Durgesh Suthar, Co-founder, Bold Finance further added, “We are building a distributed finance tech platform which allows us to scale to multiple branches while having robust de-risking mechanisms across the stakeholders such as partner branches, customers, logistics etc. by analysing multiple data points.”

Sunitha Viswanathan, Partner, Kae Capital said “The gold lending industry is a large $65B market that continues to be unorganized and fragmented. The customer is looking for a superior experience while borrowing. We believe that Bold’s approach of partnering with the jewellers breaks the trust barrier with the consumer and enables them to deepen the relationship. We are excited to partner with Bold as they build a customer-centric fintech platform for Bharat.”