CRED – Inspiring Journey Of A $800-Million Startup

For a long time, paying the bills of credit cards wasn’t something that we enjoyed and looked forward to do so. But with the launch of CRED, even this process has become ‘fun’ for the working professionals.

If you use this fintech platform to pay your card bills you can simply earn CRED coins and get exclusive member deals across various in-app offerings. What makes this app more interesting is that, once you have collected enough such coins you can even check out the CRED store to find a range of products from curated brands.

In this blog, we will present you a brief analysis of CRED’s journey so far.

To begin with, let’s understand what kind of a platform CRED is.

What is CRED?

CRED is a Bangalore-based startup which allows the credit card users to pay their card bills through this platform and also earn reward points for each transaction. This fintech platform also helps the users to make their house rent payments. Moreover, the company assures you the complete protection of all your data and information, which makes it fully safe and secure to use.

How did it begin?

Well, the idea behind launching CRED was quite clear. Its founder Kunal Shah wanted to create a platform which can make young generation’s life more systematic in terms of managing finance.

He wanted to offer more privileges and benefits for the people having good credit scores and so creating a flywheel effect for them was important to improve the scores. As far as the target audience was concerned, Kunal decided to focus specifically on those people who pay their taxes on time just like a responsible citizen of the country.

So, what motivated Kunal to launch CRED in India? Well, after Kunal Shah’s first venture, FreeCharge, was sold to Snapdeal in 2015, he spent a lot of time in traveling and exploring new things about several developed nations. One common point, which he actually noticed while learning about such countries, there was a high degree of trust extended by the system upon the public. For an instance, they had petrol pumps without any attendant, or self-checkout counters in the supermarkets. That’s how Kunal understood the importance of frictionless environment, which means an environment where all the costs and restraints related to the transactions are non-existent.

In this way, eliminating the scope of confusion and errors, Kunal Shah established a trustworthy platform for public, CRED, in 2018.

About Kunal Shah

Born in 1983, Kunal graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy from Wilson College, Mumbai and later pursued MBA from the Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS) before dropping out. The Mumbai-born businessman started his entrepreneurial journey with PaisaBack, a cashback and promotional platform for the retailers. However, he soon exited that venture to establish a new company, FreeCharge, with his partner Sandeep Tandon in August 2010.

In 2015, when Snapdeal acquired FreeCharge, Kunal decided to launch another start-up CRED in 2018. 

Growth of CRED in the market

From beginning just as a credit card bill payment app to becoming a giant player in the e-commerce business and in the investment sector as well, CRED has certainly achieved a lot in the past two years. Despite growing with such a pace in the market, the fintech platform is still focusing on expanding its users rather than making profits. The company has raised over $800 million till date.

Furthermore, CRED saw a great hike in its popularity during the Indian Premier League (IPL) 2020. The company reported an increase in both its user base and the fundings when it signed a three-year deal with the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) as an official partner for the cash-rich league.

On the top of that, as of October 2020, CRED had 30 lakh customers and 20% of them were premium credit card holders.

Earlier this year, CRED became the latest homegrown company to enter the unicorn club with a Series D funding of $215 million by new investor Falcon Edge Capital and existing investor Coatue Management.

Reason behind CRED’s success

If you are still thinking that how CRED has managed to gain success in such a short period of time? The answer lies in its huge engagement. Most importantly, CRED keeps offering interesting products to its users. Options like UPI payments, which can be used to make all forms of transactions, rent payments and credit card bill payments are what propelling the continuous growth of this platform from the last couple of years. Any working professional can come to Cred and get all his basic needs fulfilled.