We are pleased to share that Mobikwik, a late stage investment by Orios, has raised an investment of $20mn from the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) in a recent round. This marks up our March 2021 investment by nearly 40%. The company is expected to IPO in the next 6-9 months unlocking further value as it continues to scale and becomes EBITDA profitable on an annualised basis.

Mobikwik, as some of us are aware, started off in 2009 as a payment gateway and wallet company competing with Paytm and other players like Google Pay, Amazon Pay and other bank wallets over the years. It became a crowded market over time with no real differentiator except scale and recall as most of the top wallets were accepted by online commerce players and offline merchants.

The company switched to a "Buy Now Pay Later" (BNPL) business in 2018 on the lines of Affirm, Klarna and Afterpay - which are highly valued fintech leaders globally, in the same space.

To do this, it capitalised on its accumulated customer base of 120Mn users with 47Mn KYC users and data on their spend patterns. As a result, it has 2.5Mn active users of its BNPL business every month who use its "0% interest for 15 day" BNPL product for making online payments to both online and offline merchants which number about 8000+. These users are "thin file" customers who are denied a credit card by issuing banks due to their strict criteria on income and credit history. Mobikwik uses its tech-enabled underwriting to digitally process the credit and receive the repayment having low cost of acquisition and overall operations.

The company has raised a total of US$ 117Mn till date from marquee investors such as Sequoia Capital, Bajaj Finance and American Express prior to investment from Orios and others in March 2021.

Founders are Bipin Preet Singh, an IIT Delhi alumnus who has and worked with Intel, NVIDIA, and Freescale Semiconductor before starting MobiKwik in 2009. Upasana Taku, is a Stanford alumnus having 21+ years of industry experience and, has worked at HSBC and PayPal before co-founding Mobikwik along with Bipin.

Orios will continue to identify and invest in similar tech-driven pre-IPO opportunities in its upcoming Next India Fund III which is available for commitment from investors prior to first close.