CRED: Literally an achieved crown for Credit card payment management

by Entrepreneur How · November 6, 2021

**A bit plag will be found as I have used quotes of Kunal Shah

The art of purchasing in advance and paying later has got a new definition with CRED. Nearly all of us use credit cards in this modern world. Every bank out there offers amazing credit card offers and we take one from each bank. But after a time, everything starts to mess with your financial plan. When you find yourself in such a mess, you should think of CRED. CRED is actually an app or platform where you can add all your credit card details and it will manage your payments without missing any due date. It will offer you timely reminders and manage your financial plannings so well.

Foundation year: 2018

Headquarter: Karnataka, India

Founders: Kunal Shah

Website: https://cred.club/

How did it all start?

CRED was founded by Kunal Shah and about CRED, he said “ Our goal was very simple. Can we create a platform where we actually make life better and systematically allow more and more privileges and benefits to come to people for having good credit scores and therefore, creating a flywheel effect for more people wanting to improve their scores? “

It was founded in 2018. This is basically a members-only application and it offers exclusive rewards to its users for paying their credit card bills accordingly. The main motto of this platform is to make credit card bill payments easier and reward users for their bill payments.

Kunal Shah is a graduate of Wilson College, Mumbai in Philosophy. And the most surprising fact is that he does not even have any engineering background yet he has found such a technologically advanced platform. He started studying MBA at Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS) but didn’t complete the course due to some reasons.

Apart from this he is an angel investor and supported many startups across Asia such as Razorpay, Go-Jek, Unacademy, Zilingo, and so on.

Business Model and Revenue Model

Still today, the main focus of CRED is to expand its user base instead of making a huge profit. But we can say that there are various channels that CRED can use for profit in the coming years. CRED can go for data monetization. But we can also say that CRED may not sell its data and use that for enhancing the user experience of the platform.

Regarding the revenue model of CRED, Kunal said, “At this point of time, the company is going to be solely focused on growing both revenues as well as the scale of the company and prioritize profit once we have managed to get a significant market share of these customers.”

CRED funding and growth

Presently CRE has a valuation ranging between $700 million and $ 800 million. In 2019, it raised $120 million in a series of funding. A lot of renowned technology investors were included in the funding series such as General Catalyst, Ribbit Capital, Greenoaks Capital, Apoletto Asia, and Dragoneer Investment Group. Sequoia Capital India offered $4 million for the growth of this platform. In the Series C round, it raised $81 million in 2021. In the series D funding, it has raised $215 million recently in the month of April 2021. And now it has the status of a Unicorn.

We can say that presently CRED is not concentrating on making a profit, rather it has been focusing on facilitating personal loans in collaboration with various banks and non-banking firms. Recently, it has attracted huge attention during the IPL and we can hope that soon it is going to do and show us something big that none of us have ever imagined.

It has been showing steady growth over years. It may be a newly born platform but already it has joined the Unicorn club. We must mention that presently CRED is having controls on 22% of all credit card payments in this country on a monthly basis according to the founder Kunal Shah.