Sachin Bansal’s Navi Technologies Files $400 Million IPO

Sachin Bansal’s Navi Technologies, a fintech startup, has filed for a $400 million IPO, Initial Public Offering. Billionaire Bansal, who also co-founded Flipkart over a decade ago, is the 40-year-old entrepreneur who made his name and money by kick-starting the eCommerce wave in the country, has once again made a bold choice. 

Founded in 2018, Navi Technologies offers digital personal loans, home loans, and credit against property in the lending space. It also provides customers with health insurance and digital assets management with a passive fund focus, and Bansal entirely funds the startup. 

This IPO by Navi Technologies will consist entirely of new shares, and the startup may consider raising a pre-IPO placement, according to the reports. The draft prospectus was filed with the local regulatory on Saturday. 

Navi Technologies’ IPO has come at the right time when other tech stocks have plunged in recent months. The company has been eyeing an IPO for more than a year. Now there is a sense of emergency in making the company public. 

The most recent attempt to raise money from SoftBank and other investors at over $4billion valuation crumbled following its inability to secure a license to become a bank.

The start has reported a consolidated profit of $9.2 million in FY21 on revenue of $17.8 million. It says its lending and retail health insurance products are helping customers sign up in less than 4.5 minutes and 2.5 minutes. 

In 21 months since its launch, the company’s loan business has served over 4,81,000 customers in 84% of Indian zip codes and extended 2 million Indian rupees to them with up to 84 months of tenure.  

“As of December 21, 2021, 61.17% of our health insurance policies sold were approved without any human assistance on the Navi app. We also have a chat-base interface to ensure our customers are served seamlessly throughout their buying journey”, the startup said. 

The company endeavours to enhance customers’ experience through its offerings. In this regard, the company added, “We offer health insurance premiums through EMI’s, where a customer can pay a fixed amount every month towards their policy. This has made our products attractive and affordable. During the nine months ended December 31, 2021, our GWP was $667.60 million, of which $63.26 million was from the retail health insurance segment. In these nine months, we had issued a total number of 220,491 insurance policies of which 27,800 retail health insurance policies.”