Navi Navi, the founder of Flipkart, has filed for $440 million in bankruptcy. Sachin Bansal’s Navi Technologies, a fintech company that provides customers with insurance and loan services, has filed for the 440 million IPO after the 40-year-old businessman, who made his fortune by helping to kickstart the rise of e-commerce in India, makes an unconventional choice once again.
Navi Technologies’ initial public offering will be entirely comprised of shares that are new; however, Navi Technologies may also consider raising the money prior to its IPO, as it stated in its draught prospectus filed with the local regulator on Saturday.
The IPO is happening at a time when tech stocks, as well as the majority of them, have plummeted in the last few months. Tech startups like Zomato, Paytm, Nykaa, and PolicyBazaar, which were listed last year, have been trading at their lowest prices for shares in recent months.
However, for Navi Technologies, which has been looking at its first public offering in over an entire year, there’s an urgency to taking the company public. The company’s latest attempt to get money through SoftBank along with other investors for more than $4 billion failed due to the inability to obtain the necessary licence to operate as a bank, according to two people who are familiar with the issue.
The company was founded in 2018. Navi was established in 2018 and offers digital personal loans including home loans, credit, and loans against properties in the lending market. Additionally, it offers customers health insurance as well as digital asset management that has an active fund and a focus on a passive fund. The startup is largely supported by Bansal.
Billionaire Bansal, who founded Flipkart more than a decade ago and was forced out of the company before it was sold to Walmart, and Navi have been largely out of the spotlight. The prospectus draught is the first to provide details on Navi’s diverse businesses and its financial standing.
“With its in-house NBFC (non-banking lender) arm, AI/ML-based underwriting, and digital-only D2C approach, Navi has been able to exercise control over its lending products from sourcing, underwriting, and collection and offer a smooth experience to customers,” Navi describes itself in its prospectus for draught.
Navi has announced that it’s making use of technology to provide its customers with services not provided by other businesses. Navi offers “instant loan disbursals, offers digital home loans at low-interest rates, leverages technology to manage fraud and credit default risks, uses data analytics to train its lending algorithms to offer attractive pricing and better loan account management, and exercises both digital and field collections to its advantage.”
The company, which posted a profit of $9.2 million in FY21 based on revenues in the range of $17.8 million, claims its personal loans and retail health insurance services help customers sign up in just 4.5 hours and 2.5 minutes each.
In just 21 months from the launch of Navi’s personal loan business, it has been able to serve more than 481,000 customers in 84 percent of Indian ZIP codes. They have also extended two million Indian rupees for them to enjoy up to 84 months of freedom. The total amount of the personal loans amounts to $665.
“As of December 31, 2021, 61.17% of our health insurance policies sold were approved without any human assistance on the Navi App. Further, we have developed our chat-based interface, which ensures that our customers are served seamlessly throughout their buying journey,” the company said.
“We provide health insurance premiums via EMIs, in which a client will pay a predetermined amount each month towards the policy. Our products are appealing and cost-effective. In the nine months ending Dec 31, 2021 our GWP stood at Rs. 667.60 million and of that, it was Rs. 63.26 million came from the health insurance retail segment. “During those nine months that ended on the 31st of December, 2021 we issued 220,491 insurance policies out of which 27,800 were retail medical insurance policy.”
