Credit card bill payment app CRED faces an uncertain path

Kunal Shah of CRED has successfully leveraged his credibility to raise $120 million in funding given the state of his business. The company now faces a conundrum on how and where to deploy this capital

For Kunal Shah, who founded and delivered Freecharge to a mammoth exit, raising money for his follow-up venture, CRED, was the easy part

Having raised ~$150 million in less than a year with CRED now valued at around $500 million, though, the pressure is now on Shah

He must deliver a unicorn exit to appease his roster of marquee investors such as Sequoia India and Ribbit

The question now is how CRED intends to use the funds it has raised to get to that goal

At a recent startup event, Kunal Shah, the founder of credit card payment platform CRED CLUB (CRED for short), was asked about how he raised so much money.

“I am able to raise money now because of past success,” Shah responded.

Few will dispute this contention. After all, Shah previously founded Freecharge, an online recharge business, which was sold for a then-record sum of $400 million to e-commerce company Snapdeal. This was in the halcyon days of e-commerce, circa 2015.

Now, an uncharitable observer might question whether Freecharge was a “success”.

AUTHOR

Sumanth Raghavendra

Sumanth is a serial entrepreneur with more than eighteen years experience in running startups. He is currently the founder of Deck App Technologies, a Bangalore-based startup attempting to re-imagine productivity software for the Post-PC era. Sumanth’s columns appear regularly in leading publications. He holds MBA degrees from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore and Thunderbird, The American Graduate School of International Management, USA.

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