MobiKwik makes maiden investment of Rs 2 Cr in data science startup Pivotchain

To ramp up its fintech offerings, digital payments firm MobiKwik has invested Rs 2 crore in Pivotchain Solutions, a Pune-based data science company.

This is the first-ever investment for Mobikwik in a data science company after it announced its foray into fintech lending business in October last year. Financial services company Bajaj Finserv had invested Rs 225 crore in lieu of 11 per cent stake in the digital payments company planned to push its lending and insurance products on MobiKwik.

While insurance products are available at the moment, the lending products are yet to be integrated on MobiKwik app.

Focused on banking, finance, retail and transportation domain, Pivotchain is a predictive analytics startup with expertise in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI). To simplify predictive analytics to solve hard data problems, it has built exclusive AI and deep learning models for MobiKwik.

Through the platform, MobiKwik eyes to roll out a slew of lending products to address the credit requirements of growing userbase.

Founded in 2017 by Deepak Rao and Yogendra Pratap Singh, Pivotchain provides solutions such as credit scorecards, alternate data scorecards, delinquency prediction, fraud risk management, campaign analytics, supply chain analytics, operations/logistics optimization in real time, among several others.

This will be the second such value addition for MobiKwik since its announcement of integrating UPI last month, which gave it 5 million signups within a week of launch.

According to company's founder and CEO, Bipin Preet Singh, the investment will give MobiKwik an edge over other competitors and it will continue to invest in such startups that can add value to the company.

Besides, the payments platform is also planning to partner with NBFCs to disburse loans to small businesses in the range of Rs 20,000 up to Rs 5 lakh.

The above back to back developments for the company might be eye-catching but it would be going to face stiff competition from Paytm and PhonePe. As a latecomer in UPI, as well as the lending business, competing with deep-pocketed aforementioned players, would be really difficult.

Meanwhile, the Gurugram-based company has been facing top-level attrition for the past two months. Recently, Daman Soni who was heading marketing and growth at digital payments entity MobiKwik had quit the company.

Soni’s exit was the second major reshuffle in the company after Chief Business officer Vineet Singh's exit in April.

The development was first reported by BusinessLine via PTI.