Mumbai-based digital credit platform, PaySense has raised $18 million in its series B round of funding led by PayU with participation from other existing investors Jungle Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners. PayU alone has invested around $11.5 million in the round.

Founded by Ranganathan and Sayali Karanjkar, PaySense provides Indian consumers access to a credit line based on an alternative-data decisioning model. The company utilizes India Stack to create a digitized infrastructure across government and business services in India.

This is PayU’s second round of investment in PaySense which will help realize PayU’s vision of seamless credit access to all. Last year, PayU and Nexus Ventures had participated in the Series A round which was led by Jungle Ventures. This investment demonstrates PayU’s strong commitment towards strengthening its credit play in untapped high-growth markets, like India, Poland, and LATAM and in turn creating a strong powerhouse of Fintech services.

PaySense aims to become the leading risk assessment provider for over 160 million Indian households, currently underserved by traditional credit avenues. It bases an innovative credit decisioning model, by leveraging millions of data points to profile individuals based on their financial behaviors within a Social Graph of a vast number of potential borrowers. 

Fady Abdel-Nour, Global Head - M&A and Investments, Naspers' PayU, said, "We’re excited to continue to synergize forces with PaySense and are positive that this investment will help us strengthen our position in the consumer lending space in India. We believe India’s fin-tech story is just getting started and will continue to invest in this space.”

Prashanth Ranganathan, Co-Founder and CEO, PaySense, said, "We continue to invest in our tech and team to deliver an exceedingly simple, fast and fully digital process for our customers. At this time, it’s opportune to bolster our relationship with PayU, as we share an allied vision of enabling more consumers in India to access the digital credit sector. The consumer lending market in India is ripe for disruption and this capital will equip us to focus on this huge, untapped market potential."

Serving customers in over 50 cities across India, PaySense has disbursed over 60,000 loans in the last 12 months. PaySense claims to offer a fully digital loan, flexibility in loan plans and repayment options that run over 3 - 24 months.

PayU, a Naspers company, supports over 300,000+ merchants and millions of consumers making payments online. This is PayU’s second major investment in the digital lending space in India, the other one being in Zest Money, a consumer check out financing startup.