Lentra , an India-based embedded AI-based finance startup, has raised USD 60 million – a Series B that values the startup at over USD 400 million. Existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Susquehanna International Group (SIG) led the round with strategic participation also from Citi Ventures, a subsidiary of the investment banking Citigroup.

As mentioned by TechCrunch, Citi is not just interested in tapping more into India’s tech ecosystem, but to leverage it for its own global growth, too. Lentra plans to use the funding to continue updating its platform, add new features, and make it more robust and faster. The startup is also set to expand beyond India and establish its business outside the country, starting with three economies in Asia: Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam.

Post the initial expansion, the startup plans to go beyond Asia and enter the US. The startup works with commercial banks to power their digital loan services. HDFC Bank, Federal Bank, Standard Chartered, and IDFC First Bank are some of its key customers.

Overall, Lentra has more than 50 clients and has processed over 13 billion transactions and USD 21 billion worth of loans since its launch. Helping the banks lend more As banks want to lend more and to be more accessible to more potential borrowers, they are moving to digital platforms to help them scale and compete better against digital-first offerings. However, they don’t want to take on a load of bad debt in the process of scaling, so they need better tech to improve how they vet borrowers, and also to have a better grip on forecasting what they might expect to get in returns (and losses) as a result.

The four-year-old fintech helps them do this through a variety of loan tools: Lentra Lending Cloud, which gives ready-to-use third-party API connectors to various data sources, as well as a Loan Management System (LMS) and a no-code Business rules engine (BREx) with modules for clients to use out-of-the-box. The startup also has a platform called GoNoGo in its catalog that helps banks ascertain whether a loan should be given to a customer once they get their application. Lentra’s future plans Alongside improving the offering and expanding the business, Lentra has plans to acquire complementary businesses.

The acquisition plans focus on three areas – robotic process automation, payment systems or solutions that are not regulated entities and teams working on statistical modeling or building heuristics models within statistics. The startup currently has Mumbai as its number one market, followed by Delhi, Chennai, and Bengaluru. It has a team of 500 people that is aimed to grow to 800 to support the ongoing plans.

Lentra, which is profitable, has been growing at a very fast clip. In 2019, its first year of operations, it registered USD 1 million from its annual consumption rate – this term relates to the amount of revenue Lentra makes based on usage of its APIs. As of 2022, that figure is up to USD 10 million, and it is projected to hit USD 100 million in 2024.

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