Alok Mittal, former India chief of Canaan Partners, has floated a venture which will help small businesses with formal lending called Indifi, reports TechCircle. The venture is primarily backed by Accel Partners and Elevar Equity. Other investors include Pramod Bhasin, founder and former CEO of Genpact, and Rajan Anandan, vice president and managing director, Google, South East Asia and India. Indifi seeks to improve access, reduce the overall credit operations cost by 50-60 per cent, and enable disbursements within a four days from application. Indifi will be taking a segmental approach to helping businesses with lending and integrates with the business cash flows and transactional linkages . Currently, it operates in three segments – travel, transportation and retail. Indifi charges a fee for services provided to lenders – from marketing, to data collection and analysis, and on-ground documentation and verification. Disbursals of loans will be in the range of Rs 5-50 lakh. Alok Mittal will fucntion as CEO of the company. Other founders at Indifi include Siddharth Mahanot and Sundeep Sahi. Mahanot has previously worked with Indiabulls Housing Finance, Edelweiss Financial, Citibank and ICICI Bank. Sahi has previously co-founded eLiveBooks and has worked with firms like Talisma, Clickable, Microsoft. In his last role, he was chief product officer at BSB, a digital ventures JV between Bharti Enterprises and SoftBank. Competition - In July, Online lending platform for entrepreneurs and small businesses Lendingkart raised $10 million from Saama Capital, Mayfield Fund, and individual investors Ashvin Chadha and Shailesh Mehta. - In June, online credit management service CreditMantri…
