Assessing credit worthiness in informal economy

➤ In 2017, Sucharita Mukerjee shared her new company’s vision with her 9-year-old daughter, who described access to finance as “making a rainbow world for everyone.” Inspired by this idea, Sucharita and her co-founder Puneet Gupta named their company Kaleidofin, a name they felt encapsulates the transformative potential of financial inclusion.
➤ Kaleidofin has since impacted over 4.7 million lives in India, predominantly women, secured more than $37 million from investors, and facilitated over $2.7 billion in loans.
➤ Kaleidofin provides solutions for low-income customers and businesses in the informal economy. The platform combines credit health assessment (ki score), middleware rails, risk management dashboards (ki view), and debt capital markets structuring capabilities (ki credit) to unlock finance from banks and other capital sources.
➤ Ki score, an AI/ML based credit health scoring model, uses extensive data sources such as credit history, demand and repayment patterns, demographic details, savings data, and alternative data sources to predict future probability of default for a customer applying for a loan. The score helps lending institutions decide whether to offer a loan, what maximum loan amount to disburse, what interest rate to charge, and decide on which customers to graduate from a group loan to an individually underwritten small business loan.
➤ Sucharita started her career with Deutsche Bank’s global markets team, but soon realised that generating wealth for large financial institutions was unfulfilling. Inspired by Nachiket Mor’s vision for financial inclusion, she joined Mor’s IFMR Capital as founder & CEO. Puneet, a key leader in ICICI Bank’s microfinance division, had worked with Mor to launch IFMR Trust. Despite IFMR’s success in expanding financial access, Sucharita and Puneet identified a gap in personalised financial products.
➤ In the early years, Natasha Jethanandani, a former Microsoft and Google employee, joined as CTO, and Vipul Sekhsaria, with extensive insurance experience, joined as COO. Both were elevated as co-founders in 2021.