[Funding Alert] SuperMoney raises $1 million from Unitus Ventures in pre-series A roundLending platform SuperMoney raised $1 million from Unitus Ventures in a pre-series A funding round.

Lending platform SuperMoney raised $1 million from Unitus Ventures in a pre-series A funding round, the company said on Thursday.

The Mumbai-based start-up plans to use the funds for team expansion across business development, technology and back-end operations, and starting operations in new cities across India. Currently, SuperMoney is operational in Mumbai, Delhi's National Capital Region (NCR), Kolkata, and Hyderabad among other cities.

Founded last year in January by Nikhil Banerjee, an Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Calcutta graduate and a private equity professional, and Shiv Nandan, former vice president at Deutsche Bank, Singapore, SuperMoney offers credit, savings, and insurance products to blue collar employees. These include construction workers, wage workers, and people who survive from one job to the other.

The platform's average loan amount is INR 10,000 for a tenure of 2-3 months.

"The blue-collar consumer and the emerging gig-economy segments are today not serviced by traditional banks and NBFCs and this is the $100 billion market opportunity that we are tapping into," said Banerjee, co-founder of SuperMoney.

Since the dirt-cheap availability of internet data, in 2016, 200-300 million Indians, including the working-class population, started using the internet for the first time. Start-ups from across sectors including entertainment, social media, financial services, and education apps have mushroomed to tap this massive userbase.

Typically, lending start-ups disburse loans of small ticket sizes, which banks would not disburse. Loan amount could be as low as INR 4,000-5,000. Start-ups including Zest Money, Money Tap, NiYo Solutions, OkCredit, and Instamojo, to name a few among many others, offer small-ticket loans.

"SuperMoney's enterprise led approach makes their ability to acquire and service customers more efficient and not just underwrite but also navigate credit cycles better. They are going beyond just credit and offer a suite of financial products that makes them attractive to customers and their employees," said Ramamoorthy, partner at Unitus Ventures.

Bengaluru-based Unitus Ventures usually backs early-stage start-ups. The investment firm counts Mohandas Pai, and Vikram Gandhi, among its investors.

Till date, SuperMoney has disbursed 55,000 loans and has 300,000 registered customers on the platform. The start-up has also partnered with cab-hailing platforms Uber, Shuttl, and business-to-business (B2B) unicorn Udaan, among others. SuperMoney offers its services to drivers working for Uber and Shuttle, and Udaan's customers.

"We aim to service 1 million customers in the next 24 months," said Banerjee.

SuperMoney last raised an angle round in October 2017 from investors including Shachindra Nath, chairman of Ugro Capital, and Madhukar Gangadi, founder of MedPlus, a pharmacy network.