Source : PTI |Electric vehicle (EV) digital financing platform Revfin is looking to raise up to Rs 500 crore in the next 12 months to fuel its business expansion plans, founder and CEO Samir Aggarwal has said. The company’s expansion plans include the commercial roll-out of its battery financing services before the end of this fiscal year.
The platform is also targeting to achieve a topline of INR 90 crore this fiscal on the back of expanded portfolio, which includes two-, three- and four-wheeler financing for commercial uses, Aggarwal said.
Set up in 2018 for financing electric three-wheelers, the Delhi-based digital lender has expanded the business to two- and four-wheeler financing as well as vehicle leasing and rental services.
“So far, we have raised about INR 300 crore which has been in a combination of equity and debt. And the plan is now to raise about INR 500 crore in the next 12 months,” Aggarwal told PTI.
He said that the company is in talks with a number of venture capitalists and future fund infusion will be a combination of debt and equity.
“Potentially, we will be looking at large VCs to invest in our company,” Aggarwal said, adding that the fresh capital is being raised primarily for the
Aggarwal said that 70 per cent of the business will focus on three-wheeler financing while the remaining 30 per cent will focus on new businesses.
“We have been able to grow the business at a substantial pace with a 3-4-fold year-on-year growth every year and this has been the trajectory in the last four years. While we are growing at the same time, we are also a profitable business,” he said.
The company is targeting a topline of INR 90 crore this fiscal from INR 33 crore delivered last year, he said, adding, while the total disbursement is expected to be somewhere north of INR 500 crore this fiscal as against Rs 180 crore in FY23.
“…we are also looking at going beyond providing loans and financials. We have started doing vehicle leasing and rentals and we have also started working on battery financing providing battery as a service or supportable batteries along with the vehicles that go with it,” Aggarwal said.
“But we’ve been very cautious on it because financing a standalone battery is a bit of a challenge from a risk perspective. It’s very difficult to keep tracking batteries. So we have started doing this (financing) selectively at the moment with a simple approach — Let’s do some pilots in different locations to see how this works and when we are convinced this works then we will start scaling,” he said.
Revfin is looking at the commercial roll-out of the battery financing service in the next 3-4 months, he said.
Additionally, he said, the company is also looking at financing charging stations, retrofits and electric tractors, among others, and added that “in all, we should have about eight different product verticals by March next year.”
