Cred (company)
Cred is an Indian fintech company, based in Bangalore, founded in 2018 by Kunal Shah. Cred app's main feature is reward-based credit card payments. Later, Cred let users to make house rent payments and introduced short-term credit lines. Cred has received criticism for being overvalued and lacking a sound monetization strategy. History. Cred was founded in 2018 by Kunal Shah; by 2021, the company had onboarded over 5.9 million users and processed about 20% of all credit card bill payments in India. As of April 2021, Cred offered five distinct products - Cred RentPay, Cred Cash , Cred Pay, Cred Store and Cred Travel Store. However from August 20, 2021 Cred also launched a Peer to Peer(P2P) lending feature known as Cred Mint that aims to monetise through its 7.5 million users. Kunal Shah describes Cred as being a "TrustTech" company rather than a FinTech, that his motivation to start Cred comes from solving trust issues in the Indian society, which he believes is key to economic prosperity. Funding and financial results. Funding. Cred raised funding from DST Global, Sequoia Capital (India), and Tiger Global, among other investors, through four rounds of private funding so far. Cred  posted losses of Rs. 360.31 crore in the 2020 fiscal year (FY20), caused primarily due to high expenditure on marketing and advertising. In October 2021, Cred started to seek new investors, reporting a $5.5 billion valuation, up from $2.2 billion recorded in April 2021. Marketing. Cred became the official sponsor for the Indian Premier League for three years from 2020 to 2022, in a Rs. 120 crore deal. In 2021, Cred's advertising content and videos, made in-house featuring Indian celebrities, generated significant discourse in news and social media due to its peculiarity, which was both criticized  and praised. Cred is offering instant personal loan to its users in the form of Cred Cash.